 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
|||||
|
|
|
Home > News & Events > MITRE Publications > The MITRE Digest > | |||||||||||||||||||
| Building a Modern IRS Through Enterprise Architecture July 2001 The numbers numb the mind. No, not your tax liability, but the numbers the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contends with to collect it. Serving 170 million individuals, 45 million businesses, and 5 million tax-exempt and government entities, more than 102,000 IRS employees access almost 300 legacy systems to collect $1.9 trillion in annual taxes, and 22,000 customer service staff respond to 23 million inquiries a week. Help is needed—and it is on the way through the IRS modernization effort and its emphasis on new enterprise architecture (EA). EA is important because, when business needs determine what applications are required, EA establishes how they can be operated and what results are produced. The architecture defines the system's components, how they "talk" with each other, the principles that govern their design, and how they change and evolve over time. EA is the way an organization designs its assets to conduct business. A Taxing Environment The IRS work environment currently uses technologies largely developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The agency's master files for individuals and businesses are processed the way computer files were handled then—on large, tape-based mainframes with weekly updates. More than 40 percent of the estimated 50 million lines of IRS code is written in assembly language, which is now obsolete. Worse, IRS programmers who are conversant with it are retiring, and new IRS employees do not have the skills to maintain it. A further complication is that the information in the current IRS master files is not online, so IRS staff must provide data extracts, or even extracts of extracts, to online systems. And, the tax laws change an average of 200 times a year. The IRS must accurately reflect in code the resulting business rule changes and must rewrite all applicable forms and instructions. This environment affects customer service staff, who may have to search five or more systems to answer inquiries. Moreover, the data in the queried systems can be out of synch by up to 3 weeks. A Mission to Meet Public Expectations The technical environment is only one aspect of the issue. Both the IRS and the taxpaying public have changed considerably since the agency was founded in 1952. Recent studies suggest that taxpayers today focus on how the IRS affects them, expecting the agency to do its job in a way that provides high-quality service to customers while effectively collecting the nation's taxes. To reflect taxpayer concerns, Congress incorporated many citizen recommendations into the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (RRA '98). The IRS, in turn, adopted a new mission statement to respond to RRA '98 mandates. The new mission, building on the objective to collect taxes effectively, sets a broader standard for agency performance from a taxpayer perspective. According to Andy Reho, chief architect for MITRE's IRS Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), the IRS' commitment to its new mission and the modernization of IRS processes and technologies will provide the help needed for the agency to meet its 21st century obligations. In Reho's opinion, when the current modernization effort got under way in 1997, the agency did not fully understand "the changes it would face from the development of the Internet or the reorganization of the IRS along taxpayer segment lines." Modernizing the Enterprise
MITRE's IRS FFRDC, aided by MITRE staff from across the company, provides oversight, assessment, and subject matter expertise for the EA efforts. IRS FFRDC personnel have guided the development of some of the architectural work products and documents, as well as the first release—Enterprise Architecture 1.0—which the IRS approved on Dec. 21, 2000. While EA evolves, the IRS is reorganizing internally. The agency originally
had service centers in 10 regions, each with its own regional director,
budget, and IT staff, and each serving all individual and non-individual
taxpayers within its area. Recently, in the most far-reaching reorganization
since the 1950s, the IRS modernized to a structure organized around taxpayer
needs and the groupings into which the taxpayer base falls (i.e., wage
and investment, small business and self-employed, large- and mid-sized
businesses, and tax exempt and government entities). Growth and change are desirable, and inevitable, during modernization. The flexibility in this approach to EA recognizes the moving target nature of the process. "To get to the target," said Reho, "you have to put business processes in place in concert with the IT systems. The EA describes those systems and processes and offers a basis for deciding where to invest and at what point in time." In future years the numbers the IRS contends with are expected to increase. Thanks to MITRE and its partnership with the IRS, those numbers should not numb the mind.
Page last updated: May 23, 2001 | Top of page |
Solutions That Make a Difference.® |
|
|
EA
is a vital element of IRS modernization and its customer service approach.
It describes how the IRS will operate during and after 10 years of an
effort that will cost $3 to $5 billion. MITRE, in conjunction with the
IRS and the prime contractor team, has played a crucial role in guiding
the development of the new IRS EA, which will allow the agency to make
the transition to a more efficient future while dealing with current business
and technological needs.