IRRV Performance Awards Winners
We are delighted that, in partnership with our client Valuation Tribunal Services (VTS), we have been awarded the Excellence in Innovation award at The Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation (IRRV) Performance awards.
The award rightly recognizes the innovative solution that Ceox and VTS implemented to handle Council Tax and Business Rate Appeals by members of the public and businesses across England and Wales. We have worked with VTS since January 2019 delivering a Digital Transformation Programme using innovative technology platforms from Microsoft. This transformational project moved VTS from a heavily paper based process, using legacy applications, to a modern new digital process built upon Dynamics 365.
The new system allows citizens and businesses to submit their appeals via an online service via a responsive interface. The appeal is automatically and securely entered into the VTS appeals management system using Dynamics 365. VTS use the appeal management application for scheduling all their Tribunals and assigning individual appeals to each tribunal. Whereas previously generating the legislative paperwork was a manual process, it is now done automatically. Citizens and businesses are also able to use another service which publishes the outcomes of all the tribunals, therefore providing easy access to applications. This is useful for Billing Authorities who use the information to forecast income from both council tax and business rates. Tribunal Members have also benefited with a mobile centric app which allows them to select which of the upcoming tribunals they are able to attend.
Gavin Harte, our CTO, had this to say, “Working with VTS over the past few years has been brilliant. I am proud of the work our team has done and VTS should be rightly proud of the journey they have been on. The experience for the users has massively improved whilst at the same time helping VTS be more efficient as an organisation, it has been a true Digital Transformation.”
Gavin went on to explain, “This digital transformation project has enabled VTS to realise a number of benefits including efficiencies, time savings, reduced errors and cost savings”.
