The annual Stella Awards celebrate the outstanding contributions of employees of the Ontario Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Revenue. Individuals, teams and partnerships are eligible to be recognized for their exceptional achievements in one or more of the following categories: Leadership, Valuing People, Innovation, Partnership, Quality Service, Diversity and Inclusion, and Greening.

In 2010, 17 Stella recipients were selected from 90 nominees. Members of the team who implemented GenTax® on the MOST Project and continue to support it via the ONT-TAXS Project Office were among those honored.

Sue Tilley, Director of the MOST Project and the ONT-TAXS Project Office, was honored with the Leadership award for her strong leadership throughout the MOST Project and current leadership as she continues to guide the ONT-TAXS Project.

The Small Business Transition Support Team was honored with the Partnership award, which recognized the team’s collaboration with the Canada Revenue Agency and several other Provincial agencies. The team successfully delivered one-time support payments to Ontario small businesses during their transition to the Federal Harmonized Sales Tax.

The vision of Deokia Hosein, Chairman, Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) is to make T&T one of the top ten most efficient places in the world to pay taxes.

The extra auditors hired by the Idaho State Tax Commission have already met their goal for the end of June of bringing in uncollected tax dollars into state coffers.

Fast Enterprises (FAST) today announced that the State of Mississippi has selected the company and its GenTax® commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software product as the Mississippi Department of Revenue’s solution for a modernized and completely integrated tax and revenue system.

Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, released the report Critical Capabilities for Integrated Tax System COTS Products, 2010 (ID Number: G00209433). This report serves to aid revenue agencies in understanding the current Integrated Tax System (ITS) COTS products available in the market today. As part of this process, the report compared and contrasted eight different vendors of ITS COTS products.

The Gartner report proceeds to define several “critical capabilities” (p.6) of an ITS COTS product and then “to outline some key use cases that Gartner has discussed with tax agencies around the world and to describe the role of each critical capability in performing those processes” (p.7). Fast Enterprises’ GenTax product received an “excellent” the highest-rating possible in the “Overall Use Case” finding (p.15).

The state Tax Department has been named the 2010 recipient of the Federation of Tax Administrators “Award for Outstanding Management and Organizational Initiative. “The department is receiving the award for its modern, integrated tax system. The Legislature appropriated $22 million for the system in 2006. The department has been rolling it out during the past several years.