HMRC signs £3m deal to replace in-house data-matching tool for individuals and businesses


Tax agency has awarded a contract covering the next two years and delivering a software program to supersede an existing system which can match individuals’ data but struggles with businesses

HM Revenue and Customs has signed a multimillion-pound deal for off-the-shelf software to replace and expand on an in-house tool used for matching different data across individuals and organisations.

On 19 September, the department entered into a two-year engagement with “decision intelligence” software outfit Quantexa. The deal is valued at £2.9m, inclusive of VAT.

This money will be spent on replacing an incumbent Enterprise Matching Tool, which was developed by internal HMRC teams and rolled out in November 2023. The system was designed “to match and link records for individuals’ personal tax, for sole traders and organisations’ VAT, self-assessment and employer payrolls… to form a unique customer record” (UCR).

This technology supported the wider £100m UCR project which was launched to provide the tax agency with “a single consolidated data set relating to our customers – and their relationships to other customers – that will bring customers’ information and tax affairs together and linking them to historic contact information… enabling customers to view all of their affairs through the single customer account and making it more straightforward for them to meet their obligations”, according to major project documents.

Newly published commercial information reveals that, while the existing data-matching tool created by HMRC can “link less complex customers/records relating to individuals… [it] does not currently support the complexities associated with matching organisational data”.


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This being the case, the department chose to upgrade this system with a generic commercial alternative to serve its “entity resolution” needs.

“To develop the in-house capability beyond individuals would require significant work to address the limited functional features and encryption enhancements needed,” the procurement notice added.  “Whilst a human can likely look at records from different sources and determine if they refer to the same product or not, this is not scalable across all records and the complexity increases quickly with more and larger data sets increasing resourcing pressure on operational areas.”

To deliver data-matching across its operations – enabling officials in different areas of tax to accurately match data lines across people and businesses – the software supplier has “been engaged to deliver a Quantexa solution to deliver the HMRC requirement for an entity-resolution solution to create unique customer records from multiple tax systems,” the contract says.

“This solution will feed the new Central Customer Registry to provide a ‘single version of the truth’ with regards to both individual and organisation taxpayers,” the document adds. “The UCR will be used by HMRC for tax compliance, customer outreach, and streamlining online services through use of a single account for all tax reporting purposes.”

The department intends that the technology will ultimately help provide tax and compliance officials with an improved “view of complex corporate structures and legal entities”.

The procurement notice says: “Effective Entity Resolution will work by reducing the instances of inconsistent matches, false negatives and false positives and derive canonical entities in a systematic and scalable way.”

Sam Trendall

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