IRS appoints new chief information officer

The Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday the appointment of a senior executive to the vacant position of chief information officer.

Richard Spires, who previously oversaw information technology application development at the agency, became CIO effective Sept. 17, according to a statement. The tax agency hired Spires from the private sector in 2004 to oversee a historically troubled $10 billion modernization effort.

In 2005, the IRS said it would expand Spires' responsibilities to include all application development. He was hired on a four-year, nonrenewable contract known as a critical pay authority. An IRS spokeswoman could not say if he will still be required to leave the IRS in 2008.

Spires replaces W. Todd Grams, a career civil servant who left the IRS July 7 to become the chief financial officer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Grams had been the IRS' financial chief before assuming control of its technology organization in June 2003.

Art Gonzalez, the IRS' deputy CIO, was acting CIO until Spires stepped in.

Spires assumes responsibility for IRS information technology during a time of relative stability. Often held up as the poster child of government modernization mishaps, the IRS in recent years has calmed its most vocal skeptics by beginning to demonstrate results in its long effort to replace Kennedy-era tax processing technology.

The IRS has progressively added additional layers of technology through the decades, but it still fundamentally relies on an early 1960s magnetic tape system encoded with an obsolete computer language to process tax returns.

Although the modernization project's eight-year history has had notably mixed results, recent efforts to improve program management "signal the beginning of a different phase and approach," according to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The IRS now emphasizes smaller, incremental releases of products delivered more frequently, system re-use and a more consolidated view of application development.

Recent revelations about the failure of a Web-based version of the IRS' digital tool for detecting improper tax returns raise questions, however, about how deeply the agency has changed its program management practices. In 2005, IRS managers accepted vendor promises that an improved fraud detection system would be ready, without developing a contingency plan in case the new system did not function. It didn't work; as a result, the agency paid out $318.3 million in improper funds this year, according to an auditor's report.