Have you got the ‘energy’ for another council tax rebate?

Once again, another challenge, another burden faces Revenues teams as the Government look to local authorities to administer the £150 Council Tax energy rebate. As soon as we heard the news, we asked our customers to join a discovery call to see how automation can help them; it became apparent very quickly that it could. So, we delved deeper into what we could do for them (and non-Govtech customers) to overcome this latest challenge.

Let’s explore the issues…

Do you have the resource available to manage the process of paying out tens of thousands of £150 rebate payments?

In short, no. Councils don’t have the people to manage this rebate on top of their day job, alongside ANNUAL BILLING; the grant announcement really did come whilst teams were in the thick of it. We heard first hand that councils were faced with creating yet another new team and backfilling with agency staff to handle the extra processing.

That wasn’t ideal.

Further discussions highlighted that even with partial automation of the process, given the volume of cases, any manual intervention required would be a major drain on resources. And, as we know from experience, customers will expect their rebate to be paid quickly, so the pressure is on to deliver in a very short timescale.

So how can councils overcome this challenge?

Our expertise in data validation and automation of high-volume transactional processing means we are well placed to help you to fully automate the payment of rebates. So, we are providing a fully automated end-to-end service – from application, through verification, to payment.

Our customers have helped us to design our new Council Tax Energy Rebate (CTER) scheme, a fully managed service with digital process automation at its heart. webCAPTURE verification links applications with your Revenues systems and external bank records before creating a payment file for your Creditors system. So there is no need for officers to have to get involved in the process and the checks performed meet all the usual audit requirements.

Shaped by councils, created for councils

We pride ourselves on working that little bit differently to others - and this new service exemplifies that. We asked customers to tell us what they need, how it should work, what it should do, and we’ve responded. We’re extremely grateful to customers who showed their usual willingness to engage with us, provide their invaluable insight and help us by challenging, testing, and questioning initial assumptions to produce a solution which automates the process and fully meets their needs.

Working in partnership continues to be the best approach to getting things done quickly and accurately, whilst keeping the auditors happy; time is of the essence so getting it right first time is key.

We are ready to go with the standard CTER scheme and have already begun work to support our customers’ emerging discretionary schemes. Come and join our community of Govtech customers.