This year the NSSO and Smals celebrate the 20th anniversary of the DmfA: the quarterly online notification for employers. The system represented nothing less than a digital revolution for reporting to social security agencies.

This year marks twenty years since the Belgian Governments Association for ICT Management, the non-profit association Smals and the National Social Security Agency joined forces for the Multi-Functional Declaration (DmfA). We look back on this with Koen Snyders from the RSZ, Frank Robben from Smals and the then Federal Minister for Social Affairs, Frank Vandenbroucke.

history class

In 1990, Crossroads Bank was founded, a decentralized platform for the exchange of secure information between social security actors. Snyders speaks of this decade: “The social security network is emerging, we are beginning to experiment and work on electronic data interchange.”

“In the early 1990s, paper was overwritten,” says Frank Robben, describing the situation at the time. A first step towards digitization was the transfer of the explanations to magnetic tape. At the turn of the century, the Social Security intranet moves into the open waters of the Internet and Dimona explanations are possible for the first time. “And then three years later came this big, heavy DmfA declaration.” Snyders remembers.

On a political level, Frank Vandenbroucke praises the people who worked on digitization before him: his predecessors at the time, Philippe Busquin and Magda De Galan, and Jean-Luc Dehaene, Prime Minister of Belgium throughout most of the 1990s. He calls the publication of the DmfA declaration “an incredibly important moment”.

Digital transformation in 2003

Robben: “We were in the situation where employers had to report wage details and working hours to various social security agencies. That had to be reinterpreted again and again according to different regulations.” According to Robben, this way of working meant that employers had to dig through a mountain of instructions. “Then the idea came to me where it was said, ‘Why don’t we just ask for the reality and do the legal interpretation ourselves?'” he continues.

According to Vandenbroucke, the introduction of the DmfA declaration was more than just replacing paperwork with digital communication. “It was actually a radical advance in administrative simplification,” it still sounds combative. “First, because you actually told employers just send us facts. The institutions process these facts.”

“This is a radical simplification,” he repeats, “because the employer only has to transmit a number of facts digitally and, moreover, because he does this for the entire group of social security institutions.”

It was indeed a radical advance in administrative simplification.

Frank Vandenbroucke

impact

“Everything went much faster,” summarizes Snyders. He draws the comparison with the social security declarations, which arrived on magnetic tape and had to be read. “And now we’re suddenly taking the step towards structured, electronic data traffic.” For example, a quarter is completed just a few days after the report. “That’s the moment we had to start before,” says Snyders.

A useful consequence, according to Robben, is that the institutions do not have to check and re-enter this data every time. “We made the control programs available to employers so that they could carry out a quality check before submitting the data,” he explains. A circumstance that, according to Robben, has meant that the number of errors in the declarations made since then has decreased enormously.

We handed control programs over to employers.

Frank Robben

Vandenbroucke calls it a flywheel effect in terms of further digitization and investment in ICT. For example, he points out that the National Social Security Agency was “forced” to make huge investments. “And this is a story that doesn’t end there, even today we need to keep investing in ICT,” he says. “When you see how intensive the IT work of the National Social Insurance Agency and the other institutions is, that in itself has a very important impact.”

Snyders: “DmfA meant that from now on all social security institutions used the same language and that all data from the National Social Security Office could be reused.” This was what made it possible to start the whole development of electronic social risks. It also meant new statistics, faster estimates of employment and more resources to fight benefit fraud. “We are taking the step from data analysis, data comparison and predictive analytics to a big data platform with data mining at a very high level.”

A major impact, according to Robben, is also a large reduction in administrative burdens. The planning office once calculated that DmfA saves 1.7 billion annually in unnecessary administrative costs.

The way there

Robben explains that the all-new system was quite challenging from a technical point of view. “The biggest challenge was getting 230,000 employers to support this reform.” So many companies received technical assistance.

According to Snyders, some employers and social secretariats have already evolved significantly, but not all. Not all companies mastered XML, the new standard. In order to involve everyone, the lessons were organized in this layout standard.

Smals supported both the State Office for Social Security and various other partners. According to Snyders, these ICT teams have therefore been greatly appreciated.

balance

Robben calls the introduction of the DmfA a quiet revolution and a major simplification of administration. The fact that the system is now also being praised by large international organizations is a plus for everyone involved.

Minister Vandenbroucke sees these as very fundamental steps that have made Belgium a pioneer and even a global role model in the field of administration and digitization.

Snyders notes that our entire ecosystem is now twenty years older, too. “We want to use the current situation to take a closer look at the entire environment with which we work today and to make it future-proof.” In doing so, he wants to ensure that the institutions are also equipped for the coming decades.

“This is the result of teamwork,” says Robben, “of people who dared to do their best to come up with good ideas.” He also praises the political support of Frank Vandenbroucke and his predecessors. Vandenbroucke proves Robben’s first statement by immediately returning the compliments without forgetting Koen Snyders.

It was the definitive end of the paper age.

Koen Snyders

The latter summed up the last twenty years well in a single sentence: It was the definitive end of the paper age.

This is an editorial contribution in collaboration with Smals.