HM Revenue & Customs

Development of secure PaaS

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is the UK’s tax authority. It processes all tax returns for business and individuals in the country, including over 6 million self assessment tax returns online every January.

In 2014 HMRC Digital was committed to delivering over £100m in efficiency saving to HMRC. To do this HMRC Digital wanted to deliver new user facing tax services that would massively reduce the number of phone calls made to HMRC, onwardly cutting the cost of call centres across the country.

HMRC stood up 10 new in-house development teams to make this happen. The teams started writing new digital services based on a microservice model but had nowhere to deploy and run those services. If each team built their own infrastructure (as was traditional for IT projects in government) it would result in massive delays and duplication of cost and effort.

Up to this point, HMRC had only used traditional data centre infrastructure which had been expensive and had a long delivery timeline for any new projects.

Key members of the drie team, then working at HMRC, designed and built the HMRC Tax Platform. This was a common way of building code and deploying it to environments that could then be used as test, staging and production environments. All of this was built on cloud infrastructure, giving a very low cost of change to the technology and making it easy and flexible to scale rapidly.

The team built a platform as a service that embodied the government standards on data in transit protection, data at rest protection, access control, security monitoring and other controls as laid out in the CESG Cloud Security Principles.