Letters

Skewed View

The article was right to characterize the IRS Business System Modernization as one of the largest, most complex information technology and business process transformation efforts ever attempted in our nation's history. As the IRS itself has put it, BSM is like completely redesigning and rebuilding New York City without interrupting the flow of life or commerce there.

The article ignores the most news-worthy part of the story-and the subject of much of our interview with your magazine. The IRS and CSC's Prime Alliance team have moved beyond several well-publicized difficulties and succeeded with many components of this program that are delivering enormous value to U.S. taxpayers and the IRS every day, including:

• A secure modernized IT infrastructure permits interaction between employees, tax practitioners and taxpayers. With the need for an extraordinarily high level of security to protect the integrity of financial and taxpayer information, deploying modernized applications would not be feasible without the new secure infrastructure, which has already been leveraged to develop and implement modernized customer-facing solutions faster.
• An award-winning enterprise architecture will ensure the agency's modernization projects are unified across all IRS systems.
• Where's My Refund, an Internet-enabled service, has provided 22 million taxpayers this year with instant refund status and instructions for resolving related problems.
• Advanced Child Tax Credit has given instant updates to 11.9 million taxpayers so far this year.
• Customer Communications 2001 has greatly expedited telephone call management, call routing and customer self-service applications (for example, a 50 percent reduction in call-waiting time and in the number of abandoned calls).
• E-services created a Web portal and a suite of online services to promote the goal of conducting most of the IRS' transactions with tax practitioners electronically. Today, nearly 25,000 practitioners have registered to use these services.
• The modernized e-File provides electronic filing services to large businesses and tax-exempt organizations. Since Feb. 23, more than 35,090 returns have been received, with over 3,287 electronic return originators participating as of June 13.

The untold BSM story is about how the IRS and its contractors are coming together, working in partnership to solve an extraordinarily difficult and critical problem. And there's a lot more of the story to come in the months and years ahead.