pro et con has won a tender from the central IT service provider of the federal government, ITZBund (Informationstechnikzentrum Bund). The tender includes a framework agreement for the maintenance and further development of two procedures: BIBER (Berechnung der Bier- und Branntweinsteuer – calculation of tax on beer and spirits) and ZEBRA (Zentralisierung des Brennens unter Abfindung – centralisation of distilling under compensation payment).
The two procedures for collecting beer and alcohol taxes are based on programme systems that had originally been run on BS2000 mainframes for over 30 years. In 2016, BIBER and ZEBRA were modernised in a complex migration project by pro et con. Among others, the programming language changed from COBOL to Java, the hardware from BS2000 to virtual Linux servers.
Since then, processes and functions have been continuously digitalised in BIBER and ZEBRA. One example of this is the Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz – OZG), which became effective in 2017. Since then, German public authorities at federal, state and municipal level are required to offer their services digitally via the customs portal. The OZG implementation is one of the largest modernisation projects in public administration.
In 2022, pro et con and ITZBund already reached an important milestone by expanding the ZEBRA procedure to link it to the customs portal (for more information, see the ITZBund press release and our news). Since then, applications for compensation payments can be submitted online via the customs portal, without the need of postal requests.
The internal processing, however, initially remained largely unchanged and thus requires a high degree of manual effort. This is about to change in the next expansion stage, which is currently in progress. The result will be a fully digitalised process from online recording, internal, digitalised processing and transferring results.
The new framework agreement ensures the ongoing digitalisation of administrative services and has a term of four years. We look forward to continuing our successful collaboration with the ITZBund.