Department of Forestry Tax Process Automation

The Department of Forestry (DOF) receives Forestry Product Tax information annually from the Department of Taxation to then calculate the amounts of the taxes which should be allocated to localities for reforestation and forest protection. Taxes are calculated on the quantity of forest products. Generally, the Department of Taxation provides a Microsoft (MS) Access data file in late January or February to be processed by DOF and therefore available to support the planting season which is from February – March. A single DOF employee conducted this process manually in 1.5-days. The manual process introduced the risk of human error.

ODGA worked to understand and replicate the calculations performed by the MS Access, and through this reverse engineering, was able to automate the process using SQL in Azure. The new SQL process eliminates the risk of human error and decreases the time taken to complete the task. In addition, the new SQL process eliminates the use of MS Access, which is outdated and not as robust or secure as Azure cloud. Going forward, changes in tax rates or other inputs will be easier and better controlled.

The MS Access process was used by DOF to generate ad hoc reporting. An MS Access output was moved to Excel to create graphs and the output has been used to calculate economic value of timber and logging activity. When leadership asked for historical reports, tracking down the report could be a daunting task as data storage was not standardized. ODGA was able to consolidate DOF's data, and present the data in a succinct, fast, and user-friendly Power BI dashboard.