SA gov kicks off review to overhaul legacy taxation systems

The South Australian government is undertaking a high-level architecture review of its systems responsible for processing over $6 billion in annual taxation.

The six-month review will shape a future state roadmap of the government’s taxation technology stack, forming the basis for funding bids to support long-term modernisation.

A core focus will be RIO, a 12-year-old SAP-based engine that generates taxation notices and supports the annual payroll tax reconciliation process.

The on-premises system will reach end-of-life next year and will only be supported until 2030, albeit at an additional cost.

In a supplier invitation, SA’s taxation agency RevenueSA said it is “seeking to explore what solutions and options are available in the current market before embarking on any longer-term upgrade path.”

“The outcome of this engagement is intended to inform and support the medium- and long-term application architecture direction for RevenueSA,” the documents state.

RIO is one of three legacy platforms that underpin RevenueSA’s tax collection ecosystem, each with its own “complex data architecture.”

Another is RevenueSA Online (RSAOL), the agency’s decade-old public-facing portal used for services including stamp duty, Commonwealth mandatory reporting, and payroll tax payments. The portal comprises 20 applications built on a Java-based Skyve platform.

According to the documents, "an investment is required to modernise the interface to allow it to meet the expectations of a modern portal”.

The third major system is 1AP, which was developed internally in 2017 and is used for aggregation and corporate grouping in land tax calculations and feeds data into both RSAOL and RIO. 

Based on the C# .NET framework, the platform also supports reporting and analytics functions, forming a core component of the agency's tax compliance operations.