Mexico tax system work is PeopleSoft's largest deal

PeopleSoft Inc. won a two-year contract worth more than $50 million from Mexico's Tax Administration Service, officials of the Pleasanton, Calif., company said today. The contract is the largest combined software and services deal in the company's history, they said.

The Tax Administration Service is Mexico's equivalent to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. PeopleSoft will provide consulting services and implement its enterprise financial management, customer relationship management and performance management software, as well as its enterprise portal.

The Mexican tax system is comprised of many centralized and decentralized databases across 66 countrywide collection centers. PeopleSoft's work with consolidate the Tax Administration Service's data into a single, integrated platform to better identify individual and corporate taxpayers and increase tax collections, the company said.

According to PeopleSoft, the company won the contract over SAP and Oracle Corp. after the Tax Administration Service tested each company's solution over three months.

"There are only three companies in the world that can do this ? Oracle, SAP and us. This is a major win for us," said Enrique Perezyera, senior vice president of PeopleSoft Latin America and the Caribbean.

Three external academic and research institutes assisted the service in its evaluation of the three companies' solutions, as did the World Bank, which put up 70 percent of the money for the project, Perezyera said. The Mexican government is paying for the remaining 30 percent, he said.

PeopleSoft will also link taxpayers to the Tax Administration Service through the portal, as well as phone and e-mail. Taxpayers will have secure, online access to personalized account statements.

Subcontractors to PeopleSoft include IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., and SPL WorldGroup Inc. of San Francisco.