Designing to reduce debt
We worked with the Welsh Revenue Authority to improve their services and reduce rates of people getting into debt
I’ve just finished 15 months working at Awdurdod Cyllid Cymru | Welsh Revenue Authority (WRA). WRA is Wales’ tax authority responsible for collecting, among other things, Land Transaction Tax, the equivalent to England’s Stamp Duty.
As part of 2 internal teams, almost all who are civil servants, I worked on 3 broad types of work:
– shipping live changes to reduce rates of people getting into debt
– designing new services to make paying taxes less stressful and time consuming
– unpicking the back-office systems staff use to support taxpayers
There’s lots I could pick out, but I’m particularly proud to have worked on a reminder letter for someone to pay their tax bill 7 days before interest and fines kick in.
Automating a proactive state
It started as an experiment with a hundred hand typed and posted letters. The original trial showed the letter reduced late payments by 11%. The thing I like most about this letter, and still quite rare for government, is that it is proactive. It’s a public service that’s trying to help you before a situation gets bad. The idea of a proactive state is something we at dxw have been advocating for a while now.
The team automated the whole process, using a banking API to check if someone had paid and GOV.UK Notify to print and post the letters. While it was a lot of work, relatively speaking, there was minimal software development needed for something that will likely save money and stress for thousands of people. Government services should always ask, ‘what’s the minimal software to solve this problem?’
I designed the letter to look clear and official – it might be the first time someone has heard of the WRA, as it’s usually a property lawyer who pays the tax on their behalf. I wrote the code for the HTML template the letter is generated from. It was fun being super precise and specifying HTML in millimeters, as the GOV.UK Notify API is strict about sizing for correct printing and postage. I also stripped out any colour, as a test print sent to Notify with some colour on things like the logo came out looking washed out (see next image), which isn’t what you want from a letter people need to trust is legitimate.
Waiting to see the results
The letters are now live and being automatically generated, printed and sent each working day. The team is waiting a few months to evaluate the results. Then there’ll be enough letters sent to be statistically significant to judge the impact they’ve had on the rates of people paying on time.
The civil servants at WRA are friendly, collaborative, hard working and open to trying things. I’m a big fan of devolution to deliver public services closer to people’s lives.