Tax authority delivers a reliable online experience during annual tax filing

This European national tax authority offers a completely digitalized tax filing system and is part of a government that's won numerous awards for its e-government leadership.

For over five years, this tax authority has used Queue-it to protect its digital tax portal on its busiest days. Find out how they've expanded and optimized their use of the virtual waiting room to improve operational efficiency, boost citizen satisfaction, and save on scaling costs across multiple digital public services.

When annual tax returns are released to the public, millions of unique visitors log in across the first two days.

Despite pre-planned scaling of their systems, this huge rush of traffic overwhelmed the national tax authority’s infrastructure several years in a row, causing bugs, slow loading times, and downtime.

When website traffic spikes brought down internal systems, thousands of employees were unable to do their job for days. The productivity loss was enormous.

The response from citizens and the media was overwhelmingly negative, damaging citizen trust and the government's reputation as a leader in digital public services.

The tax authority worked with Queue-it to implement a virtual waiting room that would remove the risk of load-induced crashes and deliver a controlled and transparent online experience to visitors. The authority used the virtual waiting room to:

• Remove the strain from their infrastructure
• Sync traffic flow with call center staffing and system usage
• Ensure fairness by letting no one skip the queue
• Protect multiple bottlenecks with multiple waiting rooms

To address the different login methods and bottlenecks, including the dedicated login portal for professional accountants, the tax authority set up three separate waiting rooms. Each waiting room had its own traffic threshold, ensuring an excess of visitors using one method would not impact the others.

The flexibility of the waiting room solution was also used to optimize the efficiency of staff. During workdays, the tax authority set the flow of traffic to a level that allowed support staff to access the system without overwhelming it. During evenings and weekends, they increased inflow speed to give more citizens faster access to their tax returns.

The virtual waiting room solution has been so successful, the tax authority has expanded its usage to protect other high demand registrations it oversees, including business financial reporting, car registrations, and preliminary tax assessments.

The tax authority has used Queue-it’s virtual waiting room for many years. In that time, they’ve:

• Experienced no crashes or performance issues caused by high demand
• Saved millions with effective resource planning and minimized scaling costs
• Avoided negative press and received public praise for the system
• Gave millions of citizens a fair and reliable tax filing experience