Business Systems Modernization: Internal Revenue Service's Fiscal Year 2007 Expenditure Plan
Highlights
The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Business Systems Modernization (BSM) program is a multibillion-dollar, high-risk, highly complex effort that involves the development and delivery of a number of modernized information systems that are intended to replace the agency's aging business and tax processing systems. As required by law, IRS submitted its fiscal year 2007 expenditure plan, in September 2006, to congressional appropriations committees, requesting $167.3 million from the BSM account. GAO's objectives in reviewing the plan were to (1) determine whether it satisfied the conditions specified in the law, (2) determine IRS's progress in implementing prior GAO recommendations, and (3) provide any other observations about the plan and IRS's BSM program. To address these objectives, GAO analyzed the plan, reviewed related documentation, and interviewed IRS officials.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Internal Revenue Service | To allow for more effective congressional oversight of the BSM program, and to ensure that future expenditure plans include a quantitative measure of progress in meeting project scope expectations, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue should direct the Chief Information Officer to, when developing this measure, consider using earned value management, since this is a proven technique required by the administration for measuring cost, schedule, and functional performance against plans. |
Closed – Implemented
IRS agreed with our recommendation to develop a quantitative measure of progress in meeting scope expectations but stated that it did not believe earned value management would provide this measure, given the manner in which the technique is being used at the agency. Instead, the agency developed an incremental approach to address our recommendation. Specifically, as an initial step, IRS defined a detailed qualitative measure that indicates the difference between a project release's planned and delivered capabilities and began using it in the fiscal year 2008 expenditure plan. As a second step, IRS stated it would leverage its requirements management tools to assign quantitative values to the capabilities and include the quantitative measure of progress in meeting scope expectations in the fiscal year 2012 Business Systems Modernization expenditure plan. While this plan has not yet been finalized, IRS provided us excerpts of the draft to show that it is expected to include a quantitative measure of progress in meeting scope expectations.
|