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percent of people were going to file electronically, people would say, ‘Well, that’ll never happen. They don’t even have the systems to do that.’”
1998: IRS Restructuring and Reform Act
passes, aimed at making IRS a modern financial services outfit and setting a goal of 80 percent electronic filing. Streamlined critical pay authority is granted.
2010: Form 1040 reaches the Modernized e-File system as part of a broader effort stretching from 2004 to 2014.
1999: Business Systems Modernization kicks off. Customer Account Data Engine is launched as part of the revamp and slated for a 2006 operational date. Instead of replacing IMF, CADE is eventually used as a sort of hybrid; CADE-2 is later launched to finish the work of overhauling the central IRS database.
2014: Return Review Program goes online after missing its initial 2012 deadline. Future State planning begins.
Although that bill slashed $1.7 billion from the Obama administration’s IRS funding request, Congress threw the agency a bone in the form of a strictly limited $290 million in additional money that could only be used for taxpayer services, fraud prevention and cybersecurity.
The agency’s fiscal 2017 budget request includes $343 mil- lion for modernization. It remains to be seen how much of that money lawmakers are willing to appropriate.
Political spotlight helps and hurts
There is, of course, the danger that congressional oversight could turn into congressional micromanagement.
“The biggest challenge...is as we complete a project in modernization and it goes online, like CADE-2, the operation and support for it moves into our operations and maintenance
John Koskinen
IRS Commissioner
program budget, and that’s the one that gets cut,” Koskinen said. “So what our IT people will tell you is that they’re now stuck because they don’t have the ongoing money and ability to keep up with supporting this system.”
Legislative mandates and administration priorities also tap the agency’s resources. The IRS will have spent roughly $2 billion implementing the Affordable Care Act by the end of the current fiscal year. Powner said it was one of the few government ACA technology projects to function flawlessly from the start. But Republican lawmakers have questioned the IRS’ allocation of top talent and funding to the project at the expense of taxpayer services.
“We’ve got enough systems that we get literally thou- sands of patches, security upgrades [and] we don’t have the resources to implement them all,” Koskinen said. “We
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