The new chief information officer at the IRS is predicting there will be tax processing problems in the upcoming filing season because of the agency's speeded-up program to fix year 2000 bugs in its computer systems.
CIO Paul J. Cosgrave, speaking today at a luncheon meeting of the Association for Federal Information Resources Management, said 98 percent of the IRS's software will be fixed by early next year, when the 1998 filing season begins. But, he added, "there will be some problems" because not all of the fixes will be perfect.
Asked afterward how serious the problems would be, Cosgrave said it was too early to tell. The agency is working hard to minimize their effect, he added. The good news, he said, is that when the century change actually occurs on Dec. 31, 1999, the IRS will have put its Y2K problems behind it. "We're a year early," he said. The agency is spending close to $1 billion on Y2K fixes.
Cosgrave, a well-known consultant, was brought in to help the IRS straighten out its troubled systems modernization program and build new systems to support the reorganized agency. He said the IRS will exercise more central control over information technology and try to standardize the systems environment. "Today we have 17 e-mail systems in the IRS," he said by way of example.
The reorganization announced by IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti will replace the service's current regional structure with four new units serving specific groups of customers. That change, combined with the systems modernization program, will lead to new job responsibilities for many IRS employees, Cosgrave said.
The agency will move some headquarters functions to field offices and move some back office employees to customer service jobs. But because it can't relocate many of the affected workers, it plans to "use more remote assignment work," where employees in one location work for managers in another, Cosgrave said.
The IRS also will dramatically increase its investment in employee training, from $3.5 million this year to $11 million two years from now.
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