Interfront 2023 Annual Report

24 INTERFRONT ANNUAL REPORT 2023 Operational Highlights • Operational support provided to SARS functioned effectively during the period under review. Interfront delivered a total of 95 releases to SARS, out of which 37 releases were successfully deployed to the production environment. • Production Support Services experienced a greater than 10% increase in incident handling. This is attributed to additional incidents logged due to the upgrade of the Declaration Processing System (DPS) and Registration, Licensing and Accreditation (RLA) cases, as well as incidents relating to production and project support. The team effectively managed a total of 1583 incidents and implemented 17 production changes. • The integration of the eFiling and e@syFile teams within Interfront is continuing smoothly, with minimal impact on production or support activities. • The upgraded DPS was successfully deployed into the SARS production environment. This deployment included the upgrading of the back-end service to the new technology stack and integration with Interfront Shared Services. • The eFiling hardware and software environments were upgraded, which included the deployment of new hardware, as well as operating system (OS) and SQL Server software. Additionally, web server upgrades were applied to all taxpayer-focused web servers in the eFiling web server farm. • Phase 2 of the Live Chat feature was deployed, enabling SARS agents to chat directly to taxpayers through a custom interface on eFiling. • Elasticsearch technology deployed will serve as the cornerstone of data searching and extraction, providing near-real-time insights to the SARS National Operations Command Centre (NOCC). • A Data Science capability was established to provide services aimed at enhancing SARS’ overall operational efficiency. • Several additional projects were completed, including Dual Inspections, RLA workflow changes, the Trader/Taxpayer Solution, Adobe Forms conversion, Corporate Income Tax, the Trust Filing season, the SA Traveller Management System, the Personal Income Tax Filing Season 2022, Tax Directives, Tier 1 Data Migration, Bank Detail Verification and OpenShift POC.