In Fiscal Year 2006, the IRS recognized the need to upgrade its existing portal environment and initiated the New Portal Implementation Project. A major concern that led to developing the new portal environment was that a significant amount of portal equipment was nearing or was at the end of its useful life expectancy. In addition, requirements from existing and planned projects that needed portal support could not be met due to technical limitations of existing equipment.
The IRS planned to complete the new portal environment by November 2008; however, in June 2008, the IRS Chief Information Officer cancelled the Project before it was completely developed. Reasons for the cancellation included the lack of a comprehensive enterprise strategy that considered industry best practices or advancements in portal technology, and budget challenges due to the significant expenditure requirements necessary to replace existing equipment. Subsequent to the Project being cancelled, the IRS hired a contractor to assist in developing an enterprise portal business strategy.
To the IRS' credit, they have a massive amount of information they have to manage and keep secure and, for the most part, they do a great job. But credit card companies and banks have massive amounts of information to manage and keep secure, too, and somehow they manage to do it. It shouldn't be a great trick to allow taxpayers online access to their account information but, then, this is politics, isn't it? The IRS Commissioner can't go before Congress and point out the dollar return on such an investment when they'd rather be talking about the number of audits they conducted and the levies and liens they issued.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment