A lack of IT support at the Internal Revenue Service has led to inefficiencies and cost bumps, and one reason is the agency’s business operating divisions’ minimal involvement with IT allocation.
That’s according to a July 3 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which evaluated the efficiency of IRS efforts to prioritize computer programming requests to support effective tax administration.
TIGTA also found the insufficient resources resulted in projects not taking off the ground and that the system used to track IT requests didn’t accurately reflect the status and actions taken for some requests. For instance, denial requests and IT organization resources and contractor costs weren’t consistently captured.
TIGTA’s recommendations included the chief information officer coordinate yearly meetings with business operating division executives and IRS chief officers to talk about how to better allocate IT organization resources. The watchdog also recommended all key work requests are submitted through the IT organization’s tracking system and that a process is set up to track estimated and actual resources needed to complete a work request by system or application.