OIB - Personal Identification Number in Croatia

Acronym of the case:

OIB

Web address of the case:

http://www.oib.hr

Country of the case:

Croatia

Posting Date:

10 December 2009

Last Edited Date:

04 January 2010

Author:

Zora Cazi Gotovac (Ministry of Finance)

cross-level government cooperation | Service Orinted Architecture | Event Driven Architecture

Type of initiative

Project or service
Strategic initiative

Case Abstract

The Croatian Ministry of Finance â€“ Tax Administration initiated the introduction of the personal identification number (OIB) into the Croatian legal system. The Ministry of Finance - Tax Administration is responsible for the assignation of the OIB to every person as a unique and obligatory identifier in the whole Croatian public administration system.

In May 2008, immediately after introducing the OIB Law, the two-phase OIB project was initiated, with first phase implementation deadline set to 01.01.2009. Under the important sponsorship of the Minister of Finance the project gathered all institutions responsible for making the first record of a person birth/establishment of so that OIB is determined immediately after the event, based on an information exchange with the Ministry of Finance - Tax Administration.

The project has been delivered on time, as a result of good project management by the Tax Office and APIS IT, the cooperation of all stakeholders and their ICT partners. The achieved targets of the first phase were:

All Croatian citizens were assigned an OIB (4 500 000).
All legal entities were assigned an OIB (200 000).
Starting from 01.01.2009 all newly registered legal and physical persons are assigned an OIB in real time by registration bodies.
An efficient interoperability system was implemented, based on connected government principles, providing horizontal process and data interoperability among institutions through use of state-of-the-art architecture and technology.

The first phase of the project is functional since 01.01.2009. enabling registration bodies (Ministry of Finance â€“ Tax Office, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Justice, Central State Administration Office, National Statistics Institute) to interchange the data on new person registrations and to to make real time updates, using the publish/subscribe model.

Phase 1 is a precondition for Phase 2 (deadline 31.12.2010.), which should connect public administration bodies holding official records about persons and property. The unified person entry should enable collection and correlation of business events originating in other public administration bodies, such as financial records and data in Croatia, a key precondition for transparent economy and corruption eradication, as well as a fair social support system, making procedures simpler and cheaper, while increasing the public administration efficiency.
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With the introduction of the OIB a safe communication infrastructure was created, enabling process and data interoperability among institutions. The solution is standardized and based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA), thus representing the first eGovernment solution implemented in Croatia.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Infrastructure | Interoperability | Legal Aspects

Sector

Tax | Other Social Services

Date

May 2008 to January 2009

Date operational

January 2009

Target Users

Administrative | Business (self-employed) | Business (industry) | Citizen

Target Users Description

The OIB system offers infrastructural and functional services. Its target group consists of allÂ central and public institutions in charge of physical and legal entity registration, and of all institutions obliged to use OIB for their official records.

The direct users are the Tax Office employees (around 4 000 users), with a dedicated portal application solution, and registration bodies (Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Justice â€“ Commercial Courts, National Statistics Institute and Central State Administration Office) that connect to the OIB system through their own application solutions.

Other OIB system users are all other public administration bodies (around 800), national public agencies, while banks and insurance companies that will be introduced during project phase 2. The OIB system target users are also the Croatian citizens and legal entities, who can use public web applications and SMS services to get information about their OIB.

Scope

National

Status

Operation

Language(s)

Croatian

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The OIB project is in line with the European Union and Republic of Croatia e-government development strategies.

The introduction of the OIB to all national registers and records and its use on public documents, as well as the application of the concept and the creation of the relevant infrastructure, has accomplished achievements whose outlines are defined in the Croatian Government electronic government development strategy for years 2009 -2012.

The OIB principle is in line with the directives of theÂ i2010 priority area Nr. 2 â€œEfficient and Effective Governmentâ€ since it reduces the administrative burden on businesses and citizens. and it uses open standards and open Internet protocols as agreed upon by the WS-I and OASIS SOA-standardization efforts.

In the frame of the eGovernment strategies, attention is increasingly paid to paperless and cross-organizational processes because these represent an opportunity to reduce the administrative burden and promote the cost-savings.

The next-generation e-government implementation represents an infrastructural transformation of the public administration whose main principle is the user-centric service. At the same time e-government also encompasses continuous adjustments of the legal and technological public administration framework to achieve higher work efficiencies and effectiveness, more rational usage of budget resources and a higher services.

E-government service users are:

citizens,
businesses,Â
public administration employees at all government levels,
public officials,
public administrations of other countries.

â€œThe introduction of the personal identity number will ensure public administration system transparency, because it is one of the best eradication measures for corruption, one of the main causes of domestic economy slowdown. By the OIB implementation we will establish an efficient social benefit system and eliminate unjustified social benefit claims, thus creating higher justice standards in the taxation system. This is, under many points of view, the most demanding project ever undertaken by the Republic of Croatiaâ€œ - Ivan Å uker, the Croatian Minister of Finance.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Other

Overall Implementation approach

Private sector

Technology choice

Proprietary technology | Standards-based technology

Funding source

Public funding national

Project size

Implementation: €1,000,000-5,000,000

Yearly cost:

€1,000,000-5,000,000

Implementation and Management Approach

The crucial success factor of the project was the important sponsorship of the Minister of Finance, as well as the Croatian Cabinet political decision and their clear vision and targets. The Minister of Finance summoned ministers and administrators of the key register institutions, and they made all necessary preparatory arrangements according to their authority in the shortest possible period of time (six months period). The minister supervised checkpoints and project progress in person. The technical solution and coordination was entrusted to APIS IT â€“ an agency owned by the government and the City of Zagreb.

Partnership strategy:

OIB first phase involved all key institutions and their IT teams. The Tax office project manager coordinated the work of all involved institutions. On behalf of the Tax Office, APIS IT in parallel coordinated the IT solution deployments for all institutions. APIS IT developed and implemented the central OIB system with an application for the Tax Office employees, while other registry bodies adjusted their systems to allow the connection to the OIB system The coordination was carried out on a weekly basis, with the participation of all involved institutions.
Business processes and data structure have been agreed thanks to the collaboration of all stakeholders.

The same approach has been applied to decide on data exchange standards, protocols, system testing and a successful production, with all institutions exchanging information through the OIB system on January 1, 2009.
Since the very beginning of the project, special care was taken to allow the integration with the ongoing and future projects (e-ID card, land registry reform, eInvoice, implementation of the social benefit tracking system in the Ministry of Health jurisdiction, etc.).

The OIB pre-production environment was used for system testing, where all involved institutions could perform online the whole testing procedure, according to detailed documentation and test scenarios.
Changing over to the operational phase was successfully achieved by establishing a central co-ordination body within the Ministry of Finance premises and their IT-provider APIS-IT.

The Ministry of Finance had carried out an extensive OIB project publicity campaign (leaflets, TV and radio advertising, informative web site) including public announcements on all key OIB implementation phases to secure the public support.There was an extensive training program for all participating institutions; a call center and a joint help desk system were also established.

Technology solution

The infrastructural section of the OIB system has the task to connect business processes in the most important national institutions to provide interoperability of all connected subjects in real time. To achieve this result, it has been applied the concept of SOA based event driven architecture, which is the only architecture capable of adding business value to business processes in real time. The added business value is in the possibility to view separate business processes in the institutions as horizontally connected processes. That's the way public administration can offer citizens and businesses comprehensive integrated services and interoperability on process and data levels.
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The system architecture is designed to support asynchronous processes between public administration bodies, and it is applied through the use of the Event Driven Architecture. This approach enabled real-time processing between autonomous public administration IT systems; this implies that the data in all public administration bodies are synchronized in real time.

On the other hand, it was necessary to apply advanced technological solutions in all institutions. Due to different levels of institutional technology maturity it was necessary to enable simplified use of complex solutions; that was accomplished by the implementation of functionalities on the institution side through the use of OIB nodes. This approach allowed for a unified, manageable, secure and standardized mode of integration of all institutions, and ensured the deployment of the Phase 1 of the OIB project in six months.
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The applied EDA approach, in conjunction with the SOA processes in the OIB system, represents an advanced architecture which can respond to business requirements for change and system expansion (new processes, addition of new institutions)Â in the simplest and fastest way. This approach has been implemented in all segments of the architecture by the implementation of open and accepted standards:

Inter-institutional interaction uses XML and Web services standards, including those related to security and web management (Web Services, WS-SEC, WS-DSIG, WS-XENC, WSN). The implementation of Web services Notification standard has an important role in the architecture, and it represents the main mechanism of non-invasive and flexible interaction between institutions.
SOA solutions WS-BPEL, SCA, J2EE, JMS.
JSR-168 portlet standard.

Because of the complexity of the whole system and the need of fast results, highly integrated vendor solutions were implemented as a technological solution base.

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