The Finnish Tax Administration Has Won 2nd Place in IPMA’s (International Project Management Association) Mega Project Series

The programme for modernising Finland’s tax system, Valmis, has been awarded the International Project Management Association’s (IPMA®) second place in the Mega Project Series for projects with a budget of more than €200 million.

The projects were evaluated based on a standard defined by IPMA®. An international team of six members interviewed organisations’ employees, people who had worked in the programmes, system and service providers and customers.

Project must have three things: 1) the project is characterised by cooperation, shared goals and high-quality project management, 2) the resources and the ways of working have contributed to the project’s success, and the ways of working have been improved continuously, and 3) from the point of view of key stakeholders, the outcome of the project has been excellent.

The judges were impressed in The Finnish Tax Administration’s programme by excellent time and scope management while maintaining a balance in the use of human resources. The award was given 22nd of September.

The Programme Director of the Valmis programme Virpi Pikkarainen’s hint for a successful project is giving responsibility, listening and follow-ups. Things need to be addressed if necessary and you need to learn to talk about problems too. (Projektimaailma 1/2021 magazine)

Last Years’ Project of The Year Winner

The Valmis programme was rewarded as the Project of The Year in 2020. We also wrote an article about this in our print magazine Projektimaailma 1/2021 (article in Finnish). The Programme Director Virpi Pikkarainen says that the goal was kept in focus throughout this programme: to secure the accrual of tax revenue and to ensure that society will continue to have the resources it needs to function.

This wasn’t just an IT project either but a major strategic change:

– Our goal, starting from the very beginning was to develop operations and increase efficiency, reduce routine tasks and increase the degree of automation. We wanted to achieve better tools to manage the customer as a whole, The Programme Director between 2013-2017 Eija Lönnroth says. (Projektimaailma 1/2021 magazine)

The new system has brought a major change to the employees’ way of working and required a lot of learning. The entire Tax Administration focused on competence development.

The part of the Valmis programme that the taxpayers are the most familiar, MyTax e-service, has received a warm welcome, and today most Finnish taxpayers manage their tax matters in MyTax.


Project Professionals Finland congratulates Tax Administration for this remarkable recognition of project expertise.

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