Client Overview The organisation is a national revenue authority in Sub-Saharan Africa responsible for administering taxes, customs duties, and levies on behalf of the government. Over the past four years the authority has been rolling out an e-tax platform — including an online filing portal, a taxpayer registration system, and an API integration with the national banking system for real-time payment confirmation. The platform is used by hundreds of thousands of registered taxpayers annually. The Challenge The e-tax platform had been built in stages, with SSL certificates procured separately for each component by the project teams involved. The authority's IT division had no unified certificate inventory and relied on reminders from the original implementation vendors — which were inconsistent and sometimes did not arrive at all. During one tax filing season the online filing portal went offline for around eight hours due to a certificate expiry that no one had flagged in advance. The downtime fell during the last week of the annual individual tax return deadline, causing frustration among taxpayers and requiring the revenue authority to issue a public statement. The incident prompted the authority's board to direct IT leadership to implement a formal certificate management process before the next filing season.“Going offline during the last week of filing season because of an expired certificate is the kind of incident that makes the evening news. We could not let that happen again.”— Director of Information Systems "Going offline during the last week of filing season because of an expired certificate is the kind of incident that makes the evening news. We could not let that happen again." The Solution eMudhra deployed CertiNext across the e-tax platform's components — the taxpayer filing portal, registration system, and banking integration API. A discovery scan identified 65 certificates across the estate, including six that were expired or within 60 days of expiry with no renewal plan in place. CertiNext was configured with filing-season priority settings, establishing a 120-day advance renewal trigger for the portal and banking integration certificates — building in enough lead time to accommodate the authority's government procurement process for certificate purchases. Automated notifications went to the IT director and system administrators, with escalation to the Commissioner of Domestic Taxes for any filing-critical certificate that entered the 30-day window without a renewal in progress. A simple dashboard view was set up to give the IT director visibility into the status of all certificates ahead of each filing season. Results Metric Before After Certificate inventory No unified view; vendor-dependent reminders 65 certificates tracked in CertiNext Filing season outage 8-hour outage in prior year Zero cert-related downtime in filing season At-risk certificates at deployment 6 expired or within 60-day window All renewed before next filing season Advance renewal lead time No process; reactive renewals only 120-day trigger for filing-critical certificates Board reporting Downtime incident required public statement Clean filing season noted in annual report The six at-risk certificates were renewed before the next filing season. The authority completed its next annual individual tax return period without any certificate-related downtime — the first clean filing season in three years. The board noted the successful filing season in its annual report as evidence of improved digital service reliability. About eMudhra eMudhra is a globally trusted provider of digital trust services, offering eSignatures, PKI, Certificate Lifecycle Management, Multi-Factor Authentication, and Identity & Access Management solutions. Licensed by the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA), India, eMudhra serves 1000+ enterprises across 40+ countries, helping organisations build secure, compliant, and paperless digital ecosystems.