IRS to roll out tax collection system

The IRS is continuing to develop applications to advance its modernization efforts, while beginning to simplify the increasing complexity of the modernization process.

The IRS next month will release its first version of the filing and payment compliance system to support the agency's use of private collectors of delinquent taxes, said Richard Spires, IRS associate CIO for business systems modernization.

"But it won't be used for collections until the summer," Spires said at an industry event sponsored by market research firm Input Inc. of Reston, Va.

The application will provide support for detecting, scoring and working on nonfiler and overdue cases through advanced case selection methods. The filing and payment compliance version 1.1 will analyze tax collection cases and separate complex cases that require direct IRS employee involvement from those the contractors can handle.

With modernization projects becoming more complex, and with IRS getting fewer budget dollars, the agency needs to better coordinate its modernization projects with other projects across the agency, Spires said.

"We need to build a strategy whereby interaction with the IRS over the Internet will be viewed in the same way that consumers interact with financial companies," he added.

The IRS is working toward consolidating business services, which could include a set of common systems, applications or standards grouped under focus areas, such as case, workload and document management. IT services will also be combined, such as under data management/warehousing and service-oriented architecture.

For example, the IRS is using software from WebMethods Inc. of Fairfax, Va., to provide integration between the many existing and modernized systems. The software provides for the use of Web services through a service-oriented architecture to exchange the data in the disparate applications. The software is now in testing, and IRS anticipates deploying it in January 2007, Spires said.

The IRS is also planning a Customer Account Manager system, that which will eventually replace the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which consists of databases and operating programs that IRS service representatives use while working active tax cases.

Mary Mosquera is a staff writer for Washington Technology's sister publication, Government Computer News.