Maryland ITS COMPASS Project Launches First Phase

July 23, 2020 Pembroke, MA – RSI, a company that specializes in providing revenue and compliance management products and services to federal, state, and municipal government revenue, labor, and child support agencies, is pleased to announce the launch of the first phase of its Integrated Tax System (ITS) for Maryland’s Compass Project.

RSI’s Revenue Premier®, a custom off-the-shelf ITS, solution to replace the existing tax administration, tax processing, imaging, accounting, collections, and Abandoned Property (AP) systems for the Comptroller of Maryland (COM), is being implemented in four phases in a cloud-hosted environment provided and managed by RSI, and integrated with COM’s existing Teradata data warehouse.

“Our implementation of Azure was RSI’s first, an industry-first, cloud-integrated tax system implementation. Working closely with Microsoft and the COM security team, RSI was able to stand up all of our environments in Azure. With our first phase in production as of July 6, 2020, we are benefiting from the security and reliability features of using the Azure Government Cloud environment for hosting, including FedRAMP compliance, not available in RSI’s competitor’s private hosting solution. As we add additional tax types, the capability to scale resources to ensure optimum performance is both cost-effective and easy to maintain. Reliance on a secure and successfully tested failover data center in a different region for disaster recovery also provides peace of mind and assurance of business continuity.”

This First Release was designed to quickly stand up the solution for alcohol taxes, a meaningful and relatively low-volume tax. In accordance with RSI’s implementation methodology, the First Release established the project team and governance model; implemented the technical infrastructure; confirmed business requirements; designed common business processes; and configured, tested, converted, and implemented a fully functional Compass Solution. The release included 78 account subtypes, over 20 inbound document types, and over 30 notice types; and was implemented on schedule.

“Today’s launch of the first phase of Compass is an exciting milestone for me and all of us in the Comptroller’s Office. I’m excited that Compass will be a huge benefit to taxpayers and our agency.”

RSI proposed a four-release implementation approach to successfully achieve COM’s modernization objectives for the Compass project and maximize initial benefits of the implementation without incurring unmanageable or unacceptable risks. Compass represents RSI’s first Azure-hosted RPE production implementation and the first state level integrated tax system implemented in a cloud environment.

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