The current economic landscape

To learn more about how public finance organizations can be a leading agent for the economic rebuild of our communities, register to watch this webinar "The key role of Public Finance Organizations in the economy rebuild." During this webinar, you will gain strategic insights from other countries on how they are restarting the rebuild of their economy.

With governments now focused on post-pandemic economic recovery, three consistent themes have emerged:

• The urgency of digital transformation: Governments now understand that digital technology and data are critical components of their nation's infrastructure. Organizations that are further along their digital transformation initiatives proved more resilient. For example, the Government of Canada swiftly pivoted operations to deliver secure critical citizen services while simultaneously enabling approximately 250,000 employees to work remotely, thus minimizing the impact to government services.
• Public-private partnerships: With organizations operating at their limits to deliver community services, to expedite the aperture of what these organizations can provide, governments must look to public-private partnerships (PPPs). The agility and additional capability that PPPs provide proved especially valuable when rival companies came together to hasten the manufacture of ventilators.
• Focus on social impact and good sustainability: Governments earmarked funding in stimulus packages to fund programs that target environmental performance, social cohesion, and economic development. The EU Green deal aims to mobilize at least 100 billion over the period 2021-2027 in the most affected regions.¹ The ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility (ACGF) provides member states with technical assistance and access to over $1 billion in loans from co-financing partners.²

The digital transformation journey within public finance agencies

Governments are relying on public finance agencies to foot the bill. These institutions struggle with significant inefficiencies as they attempt to combat increased tax evasion and fraud:

• Globally, it takes an average of 27.3 weeks to complete a VAT refund request. As a result, EU countries lose 137B in value-added tax revenues annually.³
• Every year, governments globally lose $2 trillion due to corruption. To put this amount into context, that amount would solve world hunger, provide basic education to all children, eradicate malaria, and bridge the global infrastructure gap.⁴
• With over $9 trillion in COVID-19 recovery packages planned, additional cracks in economic stimulus programs infrastructure will be exposed and reveal new, large opportunities for corruption and fraud.⁵

Digital Transformation technologies are a priority for governments and critical to how public finance agencies engage with individuals and businesses. The capability new technologies provide can ensure the highest levels of compliance and a more efficient economic rebuild.

Today’s governments are more proactive, collaborative, and transparent. As organizations attempt to enable intelligent, predictive capabilities they are finding the journey difficult. Successful outcomes can only be achieved when people, governance, technology, and data work together. Transparency builds trust and trust drives compliance. To accelerate the move to a culture of greater transparency and accountability, governments must adapt.

Microsoft’s vision for public finance ecosystem cooperation focused on economic rebuild

Along with accelerated digital transformation, a successful economic rebuild requires interagency cooperation. This cooperation needs a foundation based on verification of credentials to allow for the intelligent, real-time sharing of data. Today, many public finance agencies are unable to exchange data and leverage data analytics in a way that allows them to enact policies and procedures that most benefit communities, companies, and government.

Secure and scalable data collaboration helps governments better serve their residents, reduce administrative and compliance costs, and boost their nation's competitiveness. As governments become more sophisticated they can begin to leverage machine learning and AI to move from reactive to predictive and proactive, so they minimize operational costs and can handle crises more effectively.

Public finance organizations embrace technology innovation to expedite economic rebuild efforts

Modern grants management is required to make sure the right support package reaches the right organization or individual at the right time. A good example of how technology accelerated appropriate aid delivery, is the work KPMG and GrantCare performed in order to help accelerate relief-fund disbursement. They also improve tracking and management of federal grants for the State of Georgia.

To ensure that governments reach vulnerable populations, two components are critical: verification for eligibility and advanced analytical capabilities to segment populations and profile. The Flanders Government of Belgium is piloting decentralized identity technology to lower the burden for citizens to opt into programs while improving their trust in the government. Chile's Solidarity and Social Investment Fund (FOSIS) leverages data and AI capabilities to manage information and securely provide answers to citizens in distress. All application databudgets, program information, and operational managementis displayed in dashboards to increase transparency while Role-Based Access ensure that parties view only the data they are supposed to.

The ease of doing business is extremely important to a nation's competitiveness. The focus to improving this by reducing the administrative burden on businesses and individuals falls on organizations such as the Department of Information and Communications Technology Philippines. This organization modernized its Electronic Business and Permits Licensing System (eBPLS) to simplify processes that led to immediate cost and time savings, reduced human intervention, fewer errors, and fewer opportunities for fraud and corruption. The solution implemented also enabled faster permit processing and increased revenues resulting from improved collections.

Similarly, the Ministry of Finance Poland developed a service called. "Twj e-PIT" (Your e-Personal Income Tax), an easy-to-use digital tool. Taxpayers can use e-PIT on any computer, smartphone, smart TV, or gaming console that is connected to the internet to file their taxes. Now they can file in as little as five minutes while continuing to offer a full suite of services despite the transition of its employees to remote working conditions due to COVID-19.

Accountability is an especially important measurement for governments. Protecting tax dollars from fraud, waste, abuse, corruption is top of mind for many organizations, politicians, and their constituents. To support these efforts Microsoft launched Anti-Corruption Technology and Solutions (ACTS) to empower governments and other stakeholders in their battle against corruption. With this initiative, Microsoft hopes to support governments in their quest to innovate with technology and expertise.

At Microsoft, we are committed to complying with the data privacy and security requirements of governments. We understand that government digital reality will continue to be hybrid. To better respond to government needs we are announcing Azure confidential computing. Azure confidential computing offers data protection that has been missing from public clouds. This new service helps organizations secure sensitive and regulated data that is processed in the cloud by isolating computations in a hardware-based trusted execution environment. It also protects data that is in use to prevent it from access by a cloud provider, administrator, or user. This is built on top of secure hardware with familiar tools, software, and cloud infrastructure.

Our vision for the public finance ecosystem creates a predictive, taxpayer-centric public finance sector. It also helps measure the social outcomes of public spending, leading to a skilled workforce, modern infrastructure, and environmental sustainability.

Watch the Digital Forum: “The key role of Public Finance Organizations in the economy rebuild,” and visit Microsoft in Government to learn more.

References:

¹ A European Green Deal

² ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility

³Paying Taxes 2020

⁴We waste $2 trillion a year on corruption. Here are four better ways to spend that money | World Economic Forum

⁵Tracking the $9 Trillion Global Fiscal Support to Fight COVID-19

The post The critical role of public finance in the economic rebuild appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In November, Microsoft participated in the WCO Tech-Con Summit organized by the World Customs Organization that brought together more than 1100 attendees from 183 Customs administrations across the globe who collectively process approximately 98 percent of world trade.

The conference focused on the global economic crisis caused by the pandemic, where health and safety took precedence over economic development, where lockdowns negatively impacted supply chains, halted trade, and consequently increased unemployment, bankruptcies, and rises in fraud and illicit trade. Key technological challenges and opportunities in times of crisis were other key conference discussion topics.

While taking a painful toll on health and wellbeing, the pandemic offered organizations the opportunity to pause and reimagine certain portions of customs and trade processes. The resulting reimagining conversations focused on how to create more resilient supply chains, an always-on government that incorporates sustainability, and social inclusion into its design processes and success criteria. All parties understood that transparency and trust are more important than ever as customs organizations do their best to better implement safe and fair trade.

The rising importance of digitalization, e-commerce, and the need to redesign the modern workplace calls for accelerated adoption of technology, combined with an increased emphasis on the digital skilling of workers across the customs and trade ecosystem.

How can technology support recovery plans across different horizons?

During the Respond to Crisis phase, collaboration is paramount in all scenarios ranging from cross-agency collaboration to public-private consultations, to customs-healthcare or customs-postal cooperation to mitigate medical supply chain gaps, and to ensuring the wellbeing of vulnerable populations in lockdown.

Some of the capabilities and solutions Microsoft and its partners can provide this ecosystem are:

• Microsoft's Crisis PowerApps Platform enables rapid, resilient healthcare supply chain management.
• A touchless data capture and records management system powering a next-generation notebook for customs officers. Partners such as StarStorage are combining the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to process forms with Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to ensure compliance and governance while improving efficiency across records management via automated workflows.
• Ensuring execution of social distancing measures to ensure employees and economic operators' health and safety. The Interaction Care suite from Beabloo offers tools for measuring interactions between people to improve enforcement of social distancing in crowded spaces.
• A rapid secure digitization platform delivered by ComUnity that enables port authorities to quickly launch port authority consignee platforms in only a few days.
• Protecting employees by rapidly implementing a hybrid workplace. Leaders that empower their people with digital technology can more easily transform their organizations' processes and workplaces into hybrid models that will allow them to recover faster and emerge stronger than competitors. To build an effective hybrid workplace, organizations must focus on three things: leadership, culture, and technology.

To Recover with Efficiency, we must unlock the potential of data and AI. Use cases are countless sharing some particularly poignant capabilities and examples below:

• Microsoft Azure Custom Vision is an AI service and end-to-end platform that applies computer vision to specific scenarios such as object detection and category classification that improve security by identifying threats such as explosives and radiation.
• Enhancing the data marketplace and federated identity as made possible by the NxtPort Data Utility Platform. NxtPort’s main goal is to unlock the potential from sharing existing data and improving collaboration among all stakeholders involved in port operations. The NxtPort Data Utility Platform allows for greater speed and agility while also decreasing costs through more efficient transfers of data between different parties. Furthermore, the platform creates more transparency throughout the entire shipping process. NxtPort aims to increase operational efficiency, safety, and revenues, thus enabling you to more quickly develop your capabilities and grow your community.
• Enable remote work and touchless engagements, so customs authorities can intimately interact meet with citizens and companies through Microsoft Teams' frictionless virtual meetings. As of October 2020, Microsoft Teams reached 115 million Daily Active Users.
• Enhanced risk identification and scoring capabilities that enable remote activity-based monitoring, such as dynamic calculation of vessel risk profiles.
• Azure Machine Learning, as leveraged by partners such as Quantexa to improve entity resolutions required to combat financial and tax fraud crimes.

Rebuilding for the Future should foster a culture of innovation that considers:

• Breaking the language barrier with live speech-to-text and machine translation. This capability allows the European Parliament to communicate more closely with their constituents through an AI-based tool that transcribes and translates 24 Languages.
• Improving product classification and valuation and enabling origin tracking and fraud reduction by pairing AI with blockchain.
• Enabling secure, real-time data sharing. A particularly effective solution is CADENA: blockchain enabled, this solution allows for the implementation of mutual recognition arrangements and agreements. CADENA was developed thanks to the innovative work of the Mexican, Peruvian, and Costa Rican customs administrations, supported by the IADB and Microsoft. Their end-product illustrates how a transformative technology can dramatically improve customs and border management.
• Automating processes while reducing the risk in global trade. Microsoft partnered with EY and Guardtime to provide a blockchain platform to make marine insurance more transparent and more efficient. Maersk is among the first enterprise-level organizations to adopt this solution.
• Meeting sustainability goals through IoT and AI capabilities: monitor volatile organic compounds, early oil spill detection, reduce interruptions through predictive maintenance, reduce noise pollution and improve air quality just as Hamburg did with the support of our partner Breeze Technologies.
• Expanding border situational awareness capabilities: incorporate criminal history in port inspections; monitor cooperative and non-cooperative drones; container self-monitoring, container sensing and threats detection and alerting, authorized access, content movement in transit and ports, all enabled by intelligent cloud infrastructures. An especially innovative solution is provided by CHRONOS, a pioneer in situational awareness mesh technology using in 3D live movement tracking of objects, idle and mobile, with alert detection.
• Training for the autonomous vehicles, including ships: Microsoft partnered with JRCS to build the INFINITY Training platform. The solution combines mixed reality and AI to train both seafarers and land-based supervisors.

Earlier this year we saw customers undergo two years' worth of digital transformation within two months, proving that in times of need, technology can enable our resilient organizations to continue the operations required to allow trade to continue. Unsurprisingly, the countries and organizations that invested in digital transformation saw their economies and operations transition faster and recover faster.

Experimentation with and investment in digital technologies have both play a key role in helping companies navigate successfully through the crisis. Respondents to the McKinsey Global Survey of Executives October 2020, reported that they've seen more than 25 percent organic revenue growth in the past three years.

On a final note, we must internalize that resilient digital infrastructures as well as remote work requires resilient, powerful, and, well thought out implementations of security strategies and tools as well as skilling efforts to best unlock efficiency, improve employee motivation, and maintain the work-life balance required to best facilitate the innovation and adaptation required for further progress.

Learn more about Microsoft in government.

The post Technology for customs in the time of the pandemic appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.