Montana Department of Revenue Website, Team Earn Award

An innovative effort that led to the creation and enhancement of a Montana Department of Revenue (DOR) website has earned a prestigious 2019 Service to the Citizen: Champions of Change Award that honors public servants of all levels for their leadership and dedication to delivering an outstanding experience to the public.

The DOR service, My Revenue (app.mt.gov/myrevenue), and its project team competed against federal, state, and international efforts that produced citizen services with outstanding customer experience in the past year. The award also recognizes the use of emerging technologies, and modernization of information technology infrastructure to deliver services.

“No one’s excited to pay their taxes, but the My Revenue platform has made it simpler and easier for Montanans,” said Gene Walborn, director of the Montana Department of Revenue. “I’m proud of the work our team accomplished to make things better for our citizens while also saving taxpayers’ money.”

My Revenue is an online platform that delivers hundreds of forms to citizens with an easy-to-navigate interface. The project team’s vision to provide multiple routes for citizens to access information ensures users of all technical abilities can connect with state government effortlessly. And, the strategic concept extends beyond the front end. With this new service, the DOR can self-serve, creating its own forms and content, saving tens of thousands of dollars annually in development costs.

In the first quarter of 2019, citizens and businesses submitted more than $115,000 in payments through the service. Of the nearly 75,000 users accessing the service during this time frame, 19.5% used a mobile phone or tablet – a testament to the service’s mobile responsiveness and user-friendly design.

A home for all revenue-related forms, the application is redefining how Montana’s government serves its citizens. Instead of searching through a clunky website with little-to-no direction, My Revenue uses innovative natural language, keyword and guided searches, and an extensive form dictionary that can be filtered based on tags. Now citizens have no problem identifying the correct form in a catalog of more than 300 documents. A single sign-on component allows citizens to save progress, exit, return to drafts, and view past submissions.

Through the administrative module, DOR staff can convert paper applications to web forms at their own convenience, eliminating the need to contact outside vendors to build forms. Updates to existing forms can be published same day rather than requiring a multi-week deployment. DOR staff can configure web forms to integrate with Perceptive, the State’s preferred enterprise content management system.

Whether appealing a property tax appraisal, paying medical marijuana provider taxes, or requesting an examination of a DOR tax decision, Montana’s citizens and businesses expect government customer services to be efficient and intuitive, just like services from leading private-sector organizations. With its modern, streamlined, responsive customer experience, My Revenue fits the bill.

The winning project team includes the DOR’s Carol Schopfer, Bill Jarocki, Tarek Haffar, Patrick Miller, Matt Brotherton, and Wendy Brown, and three staff members from the DOR’s partner, Montana Interactive: Megan Gretch, Spencer Jones, and Josh Morasko.

Service to the Citizen winners will be recognized on May 2 in Washington, D.C. For more information about the event, visit www.servicetothecitizenawards.org.

About Montana.Gov (Montana Interactive)

Helena-based Montana Interactive builds, operates, and maintains the State of Montana’s eGovernment services that are available through the official website, www.mt.gov. Montana Interactive is a wholly owned subsidiary of eGovernment firm NIC.

About NIC

NIC Inc. (Nasdaq: EGOV) launched the digital government industry in 1992, and continues to lead it, providing a secure payment engine and thousands of digital government solutions across a network of more than 6,000 federal, state, and local government agencies. In addition, NIC is the nation’s leading provider of outdoor recreation solutions, with 1 out of 6 hunting and fishing licenses in the United States sold using an NIC service. The Company launched the nation’s first personal assistant for government and comprehensive mobile platform, Gov2Go, as well as the innovative, data-driven prescription drug monitoring platform, RxGov. More information is available at www.egov.com.

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