Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue

Enhanced Management of Adminitrative Fines

SAS provides faster access to updated information

CUSTOMER CASE

Industry Public Business Issue Improve the processing and management of administrative fines. Solution SAS is used from data entry to reporting and to check the reliability of data. Benefits • Increased efficiency in following up administrative fines. • Improved productivity. • More in-depth knowledge of every case. • A better overview of the departments’ efficiency.

download .pdf

What is the average time between an offence notification and the closure of a case? Which companies
have a high number of social legislation offences? Are fines being collected on time in
each province? By providing immediate answers to key questions such as these, SAS has greatly
improved the follow-up of administrative fines at the Federal Public Service Employment, Labour
and Social Dialogue.

Continuous exchange of data

Administrative fines are due from companies that have breached social legislation or legal working prescriptions. Typical cases include employing people without declaring them or avoiding payment of certain social security contributions. These offences are established by inspectors from the police or the government, and then communicated to the FPS Employment. There, the Administrative Fines department manages all steps related to processing and collecting these fines. This workflow obviously involves a continuous exchange of data with numerous parties: inspectors, police, lawyers, FPS justice and other various departments within the FPS. In 2006, the Administrative Fines department handled a total of 120,000 files.

Integrated tool for the administration of fines

“With such a vast amount of data to follow up, relying on a powerful and reliable IT application is crucial”, says Nicole Decheneux, project leader at the FPS Employment’s IT Department.“That is why we developed GINAA, an integrated IT tool to manage administrative fines. GINAA stands for Gestion Informatique des Amandes Administratives - Geïntegreerde Informatica Applicaties Administratieve Geldboeten. GINAA helps users follow up each stage of a case, from the filing of emails and letters exchanged with lawyers to the accounting operations related to payments received. Using GINAA, staff at the FPS Employment can rapidly look up information to answer questions from management, from lawyers, or from companies involved. These questions typically relate to the current status of a case.”

More openness with increased security

“The GINAA tool, however, was still running on an old mainframe. We had already decided to upgrade our hardware because it was rapidly becoming obsolete. But this meant that GINAA had to be adapted to our new computer,” Mrs Decheneux continues. “We also wanted to use this opportunity to improve the application by making it accessible to remote users over the Internet, using a VPN connection. In addition, we wanted to increase the security of the program while at the same time making it more open to other applications. We also needed to make it flexible enough to rapidly accommodate the continuous legal changes that affect our activity.” SAS was able to meet all of these requirements. As a result, the entire GINAA application was migrated to a SAS environment.

Data quality automatically checked at the source

Today, SAS technology is used throughout the management process, from data entry to reporting. The raw data is entered into dynamic SAS pages by the secretaries who receive the offence reports from the inspectors.“For the output results to be accurate, the system requires a lot of data to be typed in at the source”, observes Mrs Decheneux.“It is extremely important that this process occurs faultlessly. That is why SAS automatically carries out certain validity checks in order to safeguard the quality of data. In addition, a series of batch checks, based on a number of verification parameters, are run every night to check data quality. We find this to be a key strength of the SAS software: not only does it generate high quality reports, it also verifies the reliability of the data itself.”

Access to all information from anywhere

Company related information is grouped with other data, such as accounting figures and employment records of the companies involved. These data are all gathered in a central database. All information related to a case is thus instantly accessible, both within the FPS and remotely. Legal advisors immediately have all the required data at hand when making decisions. They are also able to generate letters more rapidly because a
number of figures are automatically filled in. As for inspectors in the field, they now have remote access to all the information related to a specific company before making a visit. In addition, the centralized system uses a single individual code for each offence, which means files can be found much more rapidly.

Better identification of trends

“The SAS-based application is providing decision makers with a much clearer overview on the status of cases,” notes Mrs Decheneux. “Our management reports, for instance, instantly show how many offences are being processed per region or type of company, what the amount collected is per type of offence, and what the trends are in the number and types of cases. Managers can view specific reports on demand; for instance, the number of offences discovered by inspectors during a given period. We are also able to provide the government with a clearer overview on the type of offences per area and the average time it takes to close a case.”

The SAS-based application also offers numerous benefits to the FPS’s IT team. Thanks to this application, the Electronic PV project can be easily managed. New reports and intranet modules can be rapidly added to meet user demands for new functions or information fields. And the application can be easily updated following amendments to statutes or legal codes. In general, programming has also become easier thanks to SAS’ object-oriented design. In the near future, the quality of management reporting should improve even further with the addition of a management cockpit featuring a number of key performance indicators. The efficiency of the system is already drawing widespread attention throughout other governmental departments.

Read More ...

• Visit FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue on the Web
• download the success story in PDF format.