Cincom Smalltalk™ has been used in a variety of applications in governmental institutions and agencies. Below are a few examples:
Built with ObjectStudio, the Wisconsin Delinquent Tax System (DTS) is used for all aspects of delinquent collections—hearings, agreements, levies and filings. It automates tasks that previously were handled manually by field agents and the central office. The Smalltalk-built DTS has led to increased productivity, improved information availability, overhead cost reduction and standardized case treatment—all of which enables this department to do more, and do it faster.
Department of Revenue IT managers investigated several development environments before selecting Cincom Smalltalk; they were impressed with Smalltalk’s code reuse and DB2 database. Ongoing maintenance has also proven to be easier and less labor-intensive than anticipated, now requiring only the part-time attention of a few programmers.
“We can issue new versions as quickly as anybody might want them. Compared with using COBOL and CICS, maintaining object-oriented applications is much easier. With ObjectStudio, the benefits and the ease of use are really there.” - Larry Lowden, application development manager at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue
And that ease of use has translated into real productivity gains,
“In the last couple years, we’ve been much more successful at meeting our collection goals. I can say that the Delinquent Tax System has certainly helped our efforts.” - Vicki Siekert, director of compliance in the Department of Revenue, Division of Income, Sales, and Excise Tax
According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, “Sweden has a very burdensome income tax rate and a moderate corporate tax rate. The top income tax rate is effectively 57 percent, and the corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, reduced from 28 percent as of January 1, 2009. Other taxes include a value-added tax (VAT), a property tax, and a capital gains tax. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 48.9 percent.”
The VAT is the Swedish government’s largest individual source of income, but it is common knowledge that cheating on VAT declarations is, well, common practice. To develop a system to examine and flag questionable company tax declarations, the Swedish National Tax Authority selected Smalltalk as its development tool—as it had years earlier when the Authority developed a similar system for examining income tax returns. The Authority chose ObjectStudio because it could recycle and reuse parts of the earlier system in the new VAT checking system and thus reduce costs. In addition, developers’ proven productivity in and preferences for the Smalltalk environment pulled it to the top in the selection process.
“The development of KONTUR provided us our first real knowledge of ObjectStudio and development using Smalltalk. ObjectStudio gave us a good incentive to continue working with it. The developers liked the environment and working with the tool. As project leader, I appreciated their productivity.” - Lennart Stenberg, Swedish National Tax Authority
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