Reducing Normative and Informative Asymmetries in Fiscal Management for Local Administrations

REDUCING NORMATIVE AND INFORMATIVE ASYMMETRIES IN FISCAL MANAGEMENT FOR LOCAL ADMINISTRATIONS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH IN THE E-GOVERNMENT PERSPECTIVE

Prof. Dr. M. Carducci (1), Prof. Dr. Eng. M. A. Bochicchio (2), Eng. A. Longo (2), Avv. M. Macrì (1), Avv. R. De Luca (1), Avv. F. Mitolo (1), Dott. G. Natali (1), Eng. D. Distante (2), Eng. N. Fiore (2), Eng. M. G.Celentano (2), Eng. S. Altiero (2) (1) Laboratorio di Legistica, Dipartimento di Studi Giuridici - Università di Lecce – Italy:(2) SET-Lab, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Innovazione - Università di Lecce – Italy

Abstract: Fiscal incomes are vital for Governments, both for central and local agencies, therefore on-line fiscal services will play a key role in the e-Government perspective. The creation of citizen-centered fiscal e-services, however, requires a new citizen –centered institutional and juridical context to be effective. The current Institution-centered scenario, based on the authoritative approach, is in fact unaware about the active citizens’ role in the e-Government perspective, as well as about the deep impact of the information and communication technologies in the citizen s’ everyday life. The paper describes how the extensive application of the regulative approach can be synergic to the extensive adoption of information technologies and user centered e-services to reduce these “normative-informative asymmetries”. The proposed approach is discussed referring to the fiscal incomes management in Local Administrations and to a real e-government experience performed in Italy.

Key words: E-Local administration, Institutional change and IT -driven modernization of public governance structures, user centered conceptual design

2 Prof. M. Carducci et alii

2

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years the diffusion of communication networks and distributed applications allowed the development of new interaction paradigms in Public Administration and of new added value services to citizens and enterprises, under the collective name of e-Government, often meant as a means to organize public governance for better serving citizens and enterprises on a comprehensive scale. As a consequence, the basic outline of an e-government vision has recently emerged and governments have taken promising steps1 to deploy e-government services both in USA and in Europe [1,2], but much remains to be done if this vision is to be broadly realized, to create non-trivial services within a coherent system of juridical and economical rules based on these new technologies and concepts.

Innovating the Public Administration, in fact, is not just the union of the various tasks (innovating institutions, reengineering administrative processes and using innovative technologies) performed in isolation, because of the additional complexity coming from their coupling, as strongly stated in [1].

As such, an effective e-government approach cannot simply pile up existing juridical techniques (borrowed from law community) with methods and notations for the design of information systems (borrowed from the information systems or software engineering communities). The crucial point is to foster the consciousness that a holistic approach is needed to integrate and extend models, design methodologies and techniques to meet e-government challenges.

In the depicted panorama, this paper is focused on the innovation in Local Public Administrations (LPAs in the following) of federal (or regionalist) countries, like Italy, Spain, Germany and Brazil, to give an integrated and trans-disciplinary answer to the following questions:

a) how to promote an effective e-government approach in LPAs, in the current context of “institutional uncertainty” about the role of the LPAs toward the citizen’s community?

b) in the current devolution panorama, which new options are imposed, and in which new tools (both technological and juridical, in the holistic sense) are given to the LPAs in order to improve their relationship with citizens?

Starting from the previous questions, the present paper aims at three main

goals: a) to analyse how, and how much, the normative autonomy of a

local Agency can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of internal

1 E.g. the “eEurope” initiative, launched in December 1999 by the European Commission.

REDUCING NORMATIVE AND INFORMATIVE ASYMMETRIES IN FISCAL MANAGEMENT FOR LOCAL ADMINISTRATIONS

3

3

administrative processes and of the services to citizens by adopting a suitable e-government approach;

b) to develop an institutional know-how oriented to the holistic innovation, able to actively involve all the institutional stakeholders;

c) to demonstrate how to organize an effective e-Government solution based on the “regulatory approach” and on the “information” of both citizens and Administrations, rather than on the current authoritative approach based on the bureaucracy.

We decided to orient our approach to Local Administration because of the very poor performance of LPAs in several key sector: in Italy, for example, the official evasion figure of estate tax is around 30% while the fiscal contentious between citizens and LPA has reached a critical level and the rate between the total entrance and population in an Agency is not well- balanced [17]. Moreover, small and medium LPAs are often overwhelmed by outdated and bureaucratic employees culturally unable to manage the complexity of the new institutional and technological scenario. So, we chose to develop an e-government framework to achieve better performances in the core services (like fiscal services, Municipal-knowledge based services, governance services etc.) of the LPAs rather than to create new auto-referential services solely based on novel technologies.

The research experience proposed in the paper comes from the collaboration among the University of Lecce (Department of Innovation Engineering and Department of Juridical Studies), the Municipality of Taviano and Servizi Locali SpA (a private partner) in the South-East of Italy, with the aim at supporting LPAs in reducing the normative and informative asymmetries in local taxation. The research activity, synthetically described by “e-government as new-government”, has been positively evaluated by the Italian Ministry of Innovation and Technologies (Agreement Protocol signed in Lecce, on Dec. 23, 2002 [18]).

The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we present the juridical and technological context and the motivations at the root of our research. Section 3 discusses the reference framework we adopt and the fundamental tools we have developed based on the framework. In Section 4 we present some results we achieved applying this framework in a Municipality. Section 5 concludes the paper and depicts some further research developments.


4

2. CONTEXT AND APPLICATIONS

2.1 The change in normative techniques

In the perspective of the institutional dimension of technology innovation, the uncertain distinction, wide spread in European legal traditions, between law and regulations creates uncertainty [20]. In fact, in the Law the decisional process takes place as authoritative form in the circle of command, in which informal and uncontrollable behaviours are active, since they are less obvious and knowable from the outside. The result is a “mono-directional construction” aimed at reaching specific goals that can be identified only by their specific content.

On the other hand, the regulation is characterized by the way it is practiced, and so it has conditional and “multidirectional” nature. It is based on the “what if” principle, and for this reason it has not executive clarifications, but hypothetical ones, which depend on the position of the single actor; and it is obtained by the “substantive due process of law”, which means the essential participation of each actor, to assure the controllability of the decisional process through the access to information.

In the Italian institutional history about the “administrative simplification, from Law 241/1990 (regarding administrative proceedings) to Law “Bassanini” (law 59/1997, 127/1997, 50/1999)”, Local Public Administrations have tried to be modernized in regulations [21]. However, above all, Local Public Administrations keep on acting in informal way, by uncontrollable behaviour, inherited from consolidated traditions, or from formal authoritative procedures, inspired to the scheme of the unidirectional discipline, less sensitive to the need of information access and control.

The reason for this institutional difficulty is explained by the “multi-purpose” nature of Local Public Administration and it is the cause of the decisional uncertainty of LPA about e-government. What is e-government for in the “multi purpose” dimension of the LPA? In fact, for LPAs there are two risks:

- the first is the “auto-reference” of technology innovations if operating in an unchanged institutional context, because it is still disciplined by authorities, more than ruled on the basis of the information access of the actors involved in decisions (Department of Public Function, 2002); [22];

- the second is administrative decisional charges increase, with the subsequent overlap of old behaviour with those determined by the use of new techniques (an example is that of the “computer


5

5

protocol” that coexists with the “paper protocol” and the plurality of offices that rule it).

In Italy, the “Analysis of Regulation Impact” (A.R.I.), introduced by Law 50/1999, answers to the first risk, and the “simplification risk”, introduced by Law 59/1997, answers to the latter.

2.2 The technological scenario in LPAs

The use of ICT can produce radical improvements in administrative procedures, if it is supported by the optimization of procedural iter. The normative techniques of regulation and simplification pursue the goal of “regulation in simplification” [23], which means:

- eliminating useless procedural steps unnecessary to decision making; - reducing functional interferences between procedures regulated by

different norms, unifying them in a unique procedural flow with a unique regulation;

- rationalizing the communication processes among the figures involved in decisions and creating a unique and consistent interface with the citizen;

- rationalizing information and documentation flows; - promoting the widespread access to decisions and their effects. The user centered approach in designing e-services and on-line

applications is the corresponding facet to this perspective in the software development communities.

Actually, providing citizens with e-services is a hot research topic today, in particular researchers focus their attention on the implementation of a single point of access to public services and information, the development of integrated platforms, common Cooperative Architectures, standardized data and communication exchanges, which will allow the public sector to provide citizens, businesses and other public authorities with information and public services structures. Examples are, among many others, the European project “eGOV” ([9],[10]), the Italian Public Administration Network ([7],[11]), the experiences about the Municipal Transformation in Norway ([12]). The mentioned services and structures lay over the integration of information flows coming from different public agencies; interesting contributions integrate heterogeneous legacy information systems ([11], [14]) in PA, or wrap Web sources, developing methods to identify and describe the contents of databases [15]. On the other hands we found references about services deployed to citizens or Public employees, developed with commercial platforms [16, 17]. We agree with the authors of [16] who define


6

unsatisfactory the use of traditional software engineering approaches to handle all the technical lifecycle aspects. Another starting point for the modelling of online services can be the design of the process behind [18, 19].

Nevertheless, the situation is not homogeneous, and from an informal survey of the current context in the Southeast of Italy, we found:

- inconsistent and uncoordinated development: local agencies execute several hundred different types of processes, reflecting a specific working or business process.

- incompatible solutions : most of the processes are still not supported by ICT and most of the solutions are now incompatible with modern technologies and no more maintained after the advent of Euro. Databases are incomplete and incompatible, and contain much redundant data.

- lack of horizontal and vertical communication: local Gov agencies don’t communicate each other and with superior counterparts at the Central state level. The result is like an ill-tuned orchestra, issuing conflicting guidelines to the local level, giving conflicting data and demanding redundant information [15]

- outdated organization solutions : Many organizational acts stem from times when paper was the only communicational and archival medium. With the emergence of new technologies and tools these acts should have been altered and modernized.

- inefficient usage of ICT: Administrative districts are relatively well-equipped with information technologies (IT). However, because of the versatility and incompatibility of solutions, the available equipment is not used efficiently and the results are far below expectations of investments in ICTs.

- inefficient usage of A.I.R. and of “regulation in simplification”. Other considerations related to the local taxes’ management process

contribute to better understand the poor quality of data owned by the Local Administration: citizens have had to calculate and to pay the amount to Government by the mediation of private agencies, adding another potential source of errors. The private intermediary has had to collect payments and, if needed, to sample audit them on the basis of information coming from the Land Registry Office, in order to assess possible tax evasions.

Moreover fiscal data is rather difficult to collect and to manage because of the lack of standards in data format throughout the years and in the related semantics and because of the unreliability of existing data. In the ICI’s case (ICI is the Municipal tax on Real Estates), for example, we verified that the percentage of ownership was not considered in ’93 and added the following year, but nobody asked taxpayers to integrate the missing information. The


7

7

result has been that assessing payments in a year and cross validating the related entries from different sources with reference to 1993 payments, two people sharing a house either declared the same estate twice or mismatched the pairs in the local land registry office and in the ICI statement.

In summary, our experience is that: - Several sources may contribute data to the system with different level

of quality, depending on the type of source (manual data input, data copied over from system to system, etc.)

- Data is often duplicated either due to poor definition of the business logic (or bad bureaucratic processes) or for technical reasons, or simply for convenience. In many cases, the logic used to synchronize and reconcile the copies, is buried in the details of obscure business processes or system procedures and the effects of duplications are difficult to analyze

- Different pieces of data are often logic ally related, but the relationship is hard to yield in terms of data model. This makes difficult to enforce integrity constraints and, therefore, to guarantee value correctness.

3. V.I.O.L.A.: THE VIRTUAL INCOME OFFICE FOR LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

The holistic approach in e-government creates new work processes and work situations, as they are highly knowledge intensive and they rely on close forms of interaction between single persons and IT. Moreover it is related to the Knowledge enhanced government, which shifts the focus from structures and processes to content. These points imply IT-support will reach the heart of administrative work: taking decision. So the management of legal/ administrative domain knowledge becomes a decisive driver in governance. At the same time, designing governmental applications and services touches two issues: transferring concepts and systems and making use of standards.

The methodology behind this approach must combine Legal Drafting and engineering techniques, which must be able to design, develop and test normative and technological tools in an integrated fashion, in order to reduce the gap of the normative asymmetry cause of the informative asymmetry, which means that norms must take technologies into account while technologies support law deployment

The research of University of Lecce starts from the upsetting of authoritative discipline experimenting the impact of innovation as decision


8

regulation in real LPA cases. As experiment a single mission has been chosen, derived from the recent constitutional reform about the normative autonomies of local agencies with the Constitutional Law n. 3/2001, which amended the whole Title V of the Constitution: this is a “constitutional innovation”, which legitimates the related institutional, organizational and technological one.

According to the new Title V of the Italian Constitution, Municipalities have normative autonomy in:

- the organization of powers and functions (art. 114 e 117 paragraph 6 of the Constitution)

- the standardization of process adequacy in delivering services (art. 118 paragraph 1 of the Constitution).

Moreover for the first time in Italian history Municipalities have taxation

autonomy to finance their own functions and to “measure” the fiscal capacity of the territory (art. 119 of the Constitution).

In this context the efficiency and the effectiveness of administrative functions conjugates with LPA decisional autonomy, aligning the Italian context to the European and international context of the “decentralization as mechanism spurring change” [24].

This incentive is particularly relevant in the field of technologies. The LPA situation (about this topic see [25]) in technological innovation

before the Constitutional reform was the following: the main model in technology innovation was either insourcing, acquiring resources (ICT infrastructure, technologies, skills, people, ect.) to manage technology inside the municipality, or outsourcing ICT services [26].

In both cases LPAs have used (or have been used by) unidirectional approaches according to the “command and control” model, without carrying about the delivery and , most of all, about the economic exploitation of information access. In the first approach the use of technological tours has been subjected both to unmodified informal behaviors and to authoritative formalism of bureaucracies. In the latter case externalisation has allowed providers to become de facto owners of data and knowledge and acquiring dominant position with respect of IT innovation in LPA, without impacting the bureaucratic formalism and depriving LPAs of any critical evaluation skill. In both cases LPAs were lack of any independent action related to the entrance of new technologies.

The “control and command” mechanism makes sense until the vertical state centralization lives, and it seems not having alternatives. When decentralization processes start deregulation dynamics with new opportunities of autonomy [27], the panorama will change radically, forcing the research of new institutional performances.


9

9

Nowadays Municipalities to be autonomous must “know themselves”, they must be conscious of their heritage of experiences, usual procedures and functionalities in delivering services, of their ability in understanding citizens needs, of checking their performance, just in order to change.

Therefore, Municipalities cannot escape the essential operation of Global Data Consulting. This need is demonstrated in Italy by the Law on Local Services (for example, the article 36 of L. n. 388/2000 - 2001 national financial act -, encouraging the introduction of proceedings for speeding fiscal local incomes up, in connection with article 31 of L. n. 448/2001 - 2002 national financial act -, which legitimates the introduction of multichannel communication with citizens also in the light of institutional communication introduced by L. n. 150/2000).

Moreover, just with these laws LPA are forced to promote not unilateral discipline to supply services, but conditional regulations on quality services, above all regarding information access, reduction of procedural phases, the creation of communication (think about “Chart of Citizens Services” or about “Regulation on services delivery ”in the article n.. 7 of the Testo Unico degli Enti Locali, D.Lgs. 267/2000).

3.1 The Local Taxation

The single mission dimension chosen for the research is that of local taxation, for a general reason and two specific ones. The general reason depends on the fact that taxation is a decisional field in which the use of innovative technology can be widely spread, but the resistance to change is strong compared to the disciplinary mentality of authorities. The two specific reasons are the following:

- the new art. 119 of the Italian constitution introduces a relevant change on the decisions of local taxation, making them dependent on the Municipal context (line 2 and 3 of art. 119);

- so the reference to the Municipal area is a relevant informative factor both to make the decisions legal [28] , and to define and calculate the “citizen’s fiscal capacity” (art. 119 line 3), as parameter of State subsidies for equalized regulation.

So the information on the taxpayer and his relationship with the living

area become the trait d’union not much of in local fiscal discipline, but above all in the regulation of municipal data archive management to allow State interventions. In conclusion, the Local Town Council should regulate its internal process, in order to create its data archive for itself and for the State (for example to create the indexes of “imposition autonomy”,


10

represented by the ratio between local taxes and State Taxes, compared to inhabitants and to the social economical characteristic of the area).

However, this Global data consulting need is not just for the relations between Town Council and the State, but is above all for the relationship with citizens. This further new Italian perspective is legitimated by an important Law: the “Statute of citizens’ rights” (L. 212/2000), that builds the relations between LPAs and taxpayers with the method of “technological information” (art. 5) and the protection of confidence and trust (art. 10): categories that globally, in the specialist literature, underline the need that the citizen not only must pay taxes, according the cliché of authoritative discipline, but also the citizen experiments informative and cognitive relations, following the “normative adaptation” technique (art.1) and according to the “what… if” logic (see [29] and [3] for similar debates on Italian literature and Brazilian local federalism [3]).

3.2 The tools based on the framework

The considerations developed so far have led to the creation of an integrated group of legal systems to allow an effective local taxation managment. To integrate these systems and in order to teach institutions how to use them in LPAs’ everyday life, they should be consequently put in a local organizational structure. This structure has been identified with the Contact Center. In fact, the Contact Center becomes the place where the fiscal problem is faced through different disciplines, in a homogeneous legal and informative “environment”, by two complementary instruments called:

- TUnifET (Testo Unificato delle Entrate Tributarie, that is Unified Paper of Fiscal Incomes) e

- SIFET (Sistema Informativo della Fiscalità e dei Tributi, that is Informative System of Taxation and Tributes)

3.2.1 TunifET

TUnifET is a legal code to regulate fiscal proceedings, that are identified not by the content of its discipline, but by the logical bond that it has in the activities to manage relationships with taxpayers. So its “subject/object” is not the tribute as citizen’s unilateral duty, but it is the fiscal relationship between Administration and citizen, built through the acknowledgment of the right to be informed and of the data which administrative decisions are based on. The TUnifET normative structure is open, thanks to the use of adaptable clauses to specific provisions of the particular case and information it produces..


11

11

In fact, by the TunifET regulation the Contact Center works not as a simple communication showcase of citizens fulfillment, but as the institutional place of the informative interaction between user and supplier within the fiscal relationship. The TunifET foundation lies in the above mentioned article 119 of Italian Constitution. Its accomplishment context is given by Laws 150/2000 and 212/2000.

Through information citizens give to the Contact Center, we can: - correct data held by administration, to avoid mistakes; - know the expectations and good faith of Taxpayer about fiscal

questions concerning him, in pursuance of Law 212/2000; - remove informative asymmetries between Administration and users,

which can create useless burdens or wrong expectations, also allowing the self-correction of the processes ruled by TunifET itself.

In other words, also in the perspective of Legal Drafting, the Contact

Center puts the self-correction approach of FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) in action. As we can’t trace the criteria of good faith and legitimate expectation back to taxpayer, as stated by L.212/2000, within predefined control schemas, because such templates are founded on the interaction between human beings and events and events are often the consequence of activities or behaviors of Administration, it is necessary for regulation to distinguish its objects from activities: the first are represented by fulfillments and conditions regulated according to the law, the latter by relationships that spontaneously take place within the “events” happened in the specific taxpayer’s case.

These relationships are not one-way disciplined by administration, but they represent the occasion to personalize the appliance of regulation on the basis of the particular case, enriching the experience and the institutional learning in building relations between administration and citizen.

The subsequent effects can be summarized as follows: 1. self regulation of the fiscal relation on the field of information

reciprocity between the Administration and the taxpayer inside a unique regulative process schema

2. elimination of useless, ineffective and far from reality phases and activities in taxpayers requirements from the normative discipline (regulation in simplification)

3. tuning of process rationalization with respect of actual users’ behaviors

4. knowledge of Administration’s clients, represented by taxpayers present in the territory


12

So, it is possible to estimate the attitude of people to pay taxes, not exclusively through juridical factors. This information is particularly important in the panorama of the new LPAs Constitutional autonomy (art 119 of the Constitution). In fact the criterion of “fiscal capacity per inhabitant”, recalled by Italian Constitution, requires the knowledge of the taxpayer on the basis not only of his incomes (whose process of Data Consulting is easily manageable), but also and most of all of the set of situations, activities and events about him, whose knowledge requires the interaction, in order to activate policy actions appropriate to the actual conditions and of the territory, of citizens and enterprises, as demonstrated by the Cost-Benefits Analysis [4].

In other words, the tuning of TunifET has “diagnostic” aims instead of regulatory, since it promotes the attitude to pay of taxpayer according to reasonable criterions by mutual consent of information and data sharing

3.2.2 SIFET

SIFET assures the homogeneity of the informative settings where to work. In order to know itself and its territory and to build the tools to measure its performance, the Municipality must be conscious of information and knowledge heritage owned inside, eventually completing and complementing it with external sources. The goal is to expose information owned inside, asking citizens and enterprises to complete it. New technologies (Internet, mobile, etc.) are very effective for this task, because they support the development of the real-time/near-time services. To enable this instant access/instant response to take place, a blending of Ubiquitous Web applications with data from legacy archives is needed, requiring design methodologies borrowed from both database and hypermedia communities.

With reference to local taxation, the ICT goal has been the design and the implementation of the Virtual Office of Incomes, a virtual center of real time aggregation of Municipal incomes, to give the Municipality the chance to know its actual entrances, to plan the budget on “certified” data and to start creating the Municipal database (an integrated virtual archive storing all information belonging to the Municipality, its citizens, its estates). To achieve this goal we “digitalized” several local taxes and incomes, focusing in particular on ICI (the Municipal tax on real estate) and TaRSU (the municipal tax on urban rubbish collection), we cleaned and integrated all the available information flows in order to obtain a complete and detailed information repository about citizens and their fiscal position. The system for managing and facilitating the heterogeneous data transformation and integration (described in another paper under publication) is based on techniques of database integration design (borrowed from the database


13

13

communities), while the design of the Web application for the management of ICI – citizen side - is based on the UWA framework (borrowed from the hypermedia communities) [5].

Different design methodologies are used according to the application views: the new services, based on the UWA conceptual framework, are designed in a user centered perspective, whilst we adopted suitable models and technologies to overcome database integration problems and process design issues.

The architecture to clean and integrate information sources (fiscal data, demographic data, cadastral data, phonebooks, etc.) is designed around the idea of pushing data through a pipeline of pre-defined processing blocks. The interconnection path among blocks represents the steps to solve the specific problem of cleansing Italian fiscal data. The integration strategy is based on a logical integration of sources, keeping physically distinct the databases.

At the same time we developed the online demographic services, using again the UWA framework to model the user-centered Web Applications, and IDEF0 to model the related processes.

The user centred design methodology, generally recognized as very effective in improving the usability of application, aims at reducing the informative gap necessary to approach the tools.

Data integration is constantly monitored by the Contact Center according to users’/citizens’ requests in the TunifET regulatory design. Beside, through the contact center the digital gap in the speed of fiscal relations is reduced, because it is possible to teach users/citizens how to use multichannel communication techniques with the administration, on the ground of a unique process regulation for all the communication ways, in order to make informative certainty easier, that is the a necessary condition to reach fiscal certainty and income certainty.

4. VALIDATING THE APPROACH: THE TAVIANO PROJECT

The town of Taviano (about 12.600 citizens) has 11.500 buildings and 17.500 lands. The results of our approach impact both the Municipality’s management and citizen services. Since summer 2001 the main aims of the present Administration have been the citizen right’s protection, fiscal equity, autonomies development, financial resources’ review, reform of the Municipal autonomy’s resources.


14

To meet these goals the Municipality has singled out technology and juridical innovation as an opportunity of autonomy exploitation and of citizen relationship development. We applied an approach based on Citizen Relationship Management concepts: the first step was to design and support an effective tax management process (the Virtual Office of Incomes), in order to give the Municipality the chance to know its actual incomes and to plan the budget on “certified” data. We used the tools described in the previous section and at the end of 2002, the results achieved have been the following:

- reduction of financial advance: 500 K€; - savings in financial charges: 30 K€ (from 70 K€ in 2001 to 40 K€ in

2002); - higher entrances: 100 K€ (10% better than in 2001), without any

increase of taxes’ rates; - savings (for direct management of taxes): 35 K€. Comparing the collected entrances with other neighbor similar towns

(Table 1), the success of this approach is evident both in volume and in rates: whilst neighbors increase or decrease their entrances by constant rates, Taviano shows remarkable increase in 2000 entrances due to the proper taxes assessment and direct fiscal management.

Table 1: Comparison of the collected entrances with Taviano’s neighbor towns

0,00

20.000,00

40.000,00

60.000,00

80.000,00

100.000,00

120.000,00

140.000,00

160.000,00

180.000,00

Tavia

no **

Alliste

*

Melissan

o*

Racale

*

Lir

e

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

(*) Fonte: Anci CNC(**) Fonte: Servizi Locali S.p.A.

FORECASTS

1 9 9 6 1 9 9 7 1 9 9 8 1 9 9 9 2 0 0 0T a v i a n o * * 1 2 8 . 1 6 1 , 9 7 1 3 1 . 7 6 0 , 8 2 1 3 8 . 8 2 7 , 8 8 1 4 3 . 7 2 9 , 9 1 1 5 7 . 5 2 6 , 3 8A l l i s t e * 1 3 4 . 1 6 2 , 5 4 1 4 1 . 7 7 9 , 3 6 1 4 8 . 1 7 0 , 1 7 1 5 4 . 0 9 7 , 0 0 1 5 8 . 7 2 0 , 0 0M e l i s s a n o * 9 9 . 8 9 3 , 1 4 1 0 2 . 4 9 9 , 9 5 1 0 5 . 9 3 9 , 0 7 1 0 9 . 1 1 7 , 1 7 1 1 2 . 3 9 0 , 5 2R a c a l e * 1 2 4 . 7 3 4 , 7 5 1 2 9 . 9 8 8 , 5 6 1 2 9 . 0 5 6 , 1 4 1 2 1 . 3 1 2 , 6 4 1 0 7 . 9 6 8 , 5 7


15

15

From a technical perspective, to support efficient and effective services to users (both outside and inside the Municipality), the first issues we run into have been the evolutionary maintenance of legacy systems towards the new services. System assessment showed the unfeasibility of integrating the new services within the old systems and required deep data quality assessment evaluation and the development of a systematic approach to clean and integrate information, since data necessary to set up the Virtual Office of Incomes had to be extracted from paper data and unreliable flows from other institutions or from internal legacy applications. As also in [14], official and unofficial data sets collected in these archives depend more on the intricacies of tax laws and bureaucracy, rather than on a rational design for data acquisition. So several information sources have been cleaned and integrated in order to understand and asses the position of each citizen with the respect of local taxes and his own estates.

Due to the nature of local taxes, the integration step has been two folded: - for each given year, information flows coming from different sources

have been integrated to get the picture of the citizen’s ownerships and payments (vertical integration);

- for each given local tax (ICI, TARSU etc.), the historical tax position of each citizen has been reconstructed and assessed by matching the corresponding records from year to year (horizontal integration).

Figure 1: Some interfaces of ICI online services from the clerk's perspective


16

Proper cleaning methods [13, 33], customized on the Italian case, have simplified the clerical review, reducing the need of manual inspection and the related costs by 70%. From the Administration point of view, this tool is very powerful to discover fiscal evaders and misalignments among information owned by the Public Administration about the citizen and his estates, highlighting history and discrepancies in data.

Fig.1 shows some user interfaces of the demonstrator supporting clerks in matching different information flows for the discovery of tax evaders: given a year and a street, all the estates are displayed. Selecting one, integrated data about the estate and its owners, from the Land registry’s office, from the ICI statement, from the National Electrical Agency, are displayed. Conversely, given a tax payer, his owned estates are shown, with data coming from his fiscal statements, cadastral office and payments.

The same set of information is the basis to build innovative online services to citizens. The user centered design for Ubiquitous Web applications had highlighted the taxpayer’s requirement to have a synthetic and clear view of his position. Figure 2 reproduces some screen shots of ICI online Web application enabling citizens to manage ICI tax. Once logged in, the taxpayer can display its ownership in the Municipal territory, and securely communicate a new variation (the addition of a new estate, the modification of an existing one or its sell).

The first screenshot represents the ownerships of the logged customer, the second is the screen shot to state the addition of new estate.

We used these prototypes to test the whole framework and to evaluate the feasibility of the technical choices (the network, security, development environment, programming languages).

Figure 2: Some interfaces of ICI online services from the citizen's perspective


17

17

From the normative side, the regulative environment offered by TunifET has allowed the construction of a relationship between users and Administration not founded on duties and prohibitions but on actions of “incentive regulation” and legitimization of taxpayers’ position, according to the information they can provide to Municipality in order to correct Municipality’s internal data and to tune its internal processes.

In the Municipality of Taviano two important figures to measure the application of V.I.O.L.A. are the fiscal trial for the introduction and the usage of the tools (TunifET and SIFET) in the “Contact Center”, which is zero, and the increasing diffusion of A.D.R. (Alternative Dispute Resolutions ) methods in the Administration. In particular the use of “istanze di autotutela” (autoprotection instances), submitted by taxpayers, has been largely used, most of all to request the data correction to Municipality.

Briefly, in Taviano the usage of self correction has been the following - In the fiscal period of 2001, 1120 “istanze di autotutela” were

submitted to correct data out of 1370 and only 120 out of 1120 had soundness. This show the effectiveness of the Global Data Consulting activities.

- In 2002, this rate is even more significant, since 330 instances have been presented out of 866 tax assessments done. Among these nobody protested against the legitimacy of regulation processes in the taxation relationship with payers.

- In both 2001 and 2002 no litigation against the Municipality was undertaken related to the regularity of its decisional processes on local taxation

- Up to April 02 2003 the results show 563 fiscal controls, without any fiscal litigations or “istanze di autotutela”.

5. CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORKS

In the interdisciplinary experience of Taviano project, the experiment of TunifEt and SIFEt has promoted the institutional, normative and organizational learning process, thanks to the institution of the Contact Center.

In this e-government experience Taviano has not been “buyer of innovation”, but “author and actor of institutional innovation” in the normative and informative scenario of processes and technologies usage.

So, instead of bearing the increase of knowledge, learning, discipline and adaptation costs, the Municipality of Taviano finds out the relativity of the e-government impact in an ongoing transforming context, like the


18

Constitutional Italian one, and, in the specific sample of local taxation, it combines innovation and the reconstruction of trust in the relationship with citizens, on the ground of data circulation and availability upon which public decisions take.

The results are the following: - The definition of clear precise meanings in the regulations with

taxpayer’s relationship; - Positive financial benefits without additional cos ts; - The elimination of unwanted effects, like fiscal trial; The main advantages perceived by Taviano’s Major have been: - learning by doing for employees involved in the project, and

knowledge transfer from the project team to the rest of employees; - better aptitude to innovation; - savings and reorganization of local taxation. We are planning to extend the empirical validation of the model and the

tools in order to tune and customize them to different backgrounds and sizes. Moreover this experience of holistic model can be extended from the critical single mission of local taxation to other function of LPAs, since it has shown the citizens’ goodwill to pay according to indicators of regulation and reorganization of informative processes.

6. REFERENCES

1. Lenk k., Traunmüller R., Electronic Government: Where Are We Heading?, in Traunmüller R., Lenk K. (Eds), EGOV 2002, LNCS 2456, pp. 1-9, 2002, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2002.

2. Batini C., Mecella M., Cooperative Processes for e-Government, in: ERCIM News No 48, Special Theme: e-Government, January 2002, pp. 38-39 (ISSN: 0926-4981)

3. Facury Scaff F., O Estadudo minimo do Contribuiente, Faculdad de Direito Universidade Federal do Pernambuco, 2000, pp. 75-89

4. Boardman A.E., Greenberg D., Vining A, Weimer D, Cost-Benefit Analysis – concept and practice, Prentice Hall, 1996

5. UWA (Ubiquitous Web Applications) Project: http://www.uwaproject.org. 6. Wimmer M, Traunmüller R.: Towards an Integrated Platform for Online One-Stop

Government, in: ERCIM News No 48, Special Theme: e-Government, January 2002, pp. 14-15 (ISSN: 0926-4981)

7. Traunmüller R., Wimmer M.A.: Web Semantics in e-Government: A Tour d’Horizon on Essential Features. In Proceedings of the WISE'01 Workshop on Web Semantics, Kyoto, December 3-7, 2001

8. Bochicchio M. A., Longo A.: “An Effective Approach to Reduce the “Avalanche Effect” in the Management of Fiscal Data in Local Public Administration. ICSM 2002: 560- 567

9. Beck E.: E-Government and Municipal Transformation: Some Experiences, in: ERCIM News No 48, Special Theme: e-Government, January 2002, pp. 21-22 (ISSN: 0926-4981)


19

19

10. Mecella M., Pernici B.: Designing Wrapper Components for E-Services in Integrating Heterogeneous Systems. VLDB Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 2001, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg

11. Pernici B, Mecella M, Batini C.: Conceptual Modeling and Software Components Reuse: Towards the Unification in A. Sølvberg, S. Brinkkemper, E. Lindencrona (eds.): Information Systems Engineering: State of the Art and Research Themes. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2000)

12. Ambite J.L., Arens Y., Hovy E., Philpot A., Gravano L., Hatzivassiloglou V., Klavans J.: Simplifying Data Access: The Energy Data Collection Project, in COMPUTER © 2001 IEEE Vol. 34, No. 2; FEBRUARY 2001, pp. 47-54

13 Bochicchio M., Longo A.: “Data Cleansing for Fiscal Services: the Taviano Project”, in ICEIS 2003, Angers, April 2003

14. Pfaff D., Simon B.: New services through Integrated e-Government, in Traunmüller R., Lenk K. (Eds), EGOV 2002, LNCS 2456, pp. 391-394, 2002, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2002.

15. Vintar M., Leben A., The Concepts of an Active Life-Event Public Portal, in Traunmüller R., Lenk K. (Eds), EGOV 2002, LNCS 2456, pp. 383-390, 2002, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2002.

16. Andersen, K. V., & Nicolajsen, H. W.. Digital Strategies for Organizational Change. Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (2001)

17. Ministero dell’Interno, Analisi Gestionale e Finanziaria degli Enti Locali (Ufficio Studi della Direzione Centrale della Finanza Locale), Settembre 2002.

18. http://dii.unile.it/mininnovazione 19. Coombs R, Miles I, Innovation, measurement and services: the new problematique, in

Metcalfe J.S., Miles I. (eds.), Innovation System and the Service Economy, Kluwer, London, 2000, pp 85 - 103

20. Graham G.A., Regulatory Administration, in Graham G.A., Reining jr. H.F. (eds.), Regulatory administration, Wiley and Sons, New York, 1943, 16

21. Cassese S., Dalle regole del gioco al gioco con le regole, in Mercato, Concorrenza, Regole, IV, n. 2, 2002, pp. 268-275

22. Dipartimento della Funzione Pubblica, Proposte per il cambiamento nelle pubbliche amministrazioni, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2002

23. OECD, Regulatory quality and public sector reform, Puma/reg (97), 1, Paris, 1997 24. Salmon P., Decentralization as an Incentive Scheme, in Oxford Review of Economic

Policy, vol. 3, n. 2, 1987, pp. 24-43 25. Morgan G. Images , Trad. italiana, Franco Angeli, Milano. 1995 26. Natalini A., Le semplificazioni amministrative, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2002 27. Peltzman S., The Economic Theory of Regulation after a Decade of Deregulation, in

Baldwin R., Scott C., Hood C. (eds.), Regulation, OUP, Oxford, 1998, 93 ss. 28. Giarda P., Le regole del federalismo fiscale nell’articolo 119: un economista di fornte alal

nuova Costituzione, JEL Classification. H7, Working Papers No. 115/2001, Jan. 2002, 11 29. Logozzo M., L’ignoranza della legge tributaria, Giuffrè, Milano, 2002

Documents

Reducing Normative and Informative Asymmetries in Fiscal Management for Local Administrations