RDF’s approach is intentionally designed to address the limitations and challenges with previous tax administration systems. These limitations primarily stem from the way the applications are built and the limitations in which they can be expanded to meet future needs. Related to these limitations is the inability to meet expectations to build national capacity to develop and integrate solutions. Currently used systems are mostly built on old technology frameworks and follow an idea that the system should be comprehensive and cover all needs of the government tax administration. This is what was considered an “integrated system” in the 1990s and early 2000s. This is vastly different from today’s best practice which builds on the emerging modular and agile approaches coming with the new web-based frameworks developed during the last decade.
Today’s expecation is that a tax administration system is integration options using data services and APIs that are agnostic to how a specific module is designed. This means any developer team can develop another module, even in another programming language and connect to the other data services. With RDF’s Single-Sign On capabilities users will not notice they are using a range of different applications and data services, often also called micro-services as they perform specific repeatedly used functions called on by bigger applications. These methods also open up for a much more effective agile approach, which focus on reiterations and gradual improvements based on usage experience. This makes it possible to provide a platform where we can build national capacity to develop future modules and integrations.