IRS RFP: Department of Education College Scorecard

Notice ID: 2032H8-24-R-00019

The Department of Education’s (DOE) College Scorecard calculator is a tool that helps students compare post-graduation earnings across different universities and programs. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Statistics of Income Division (SOI) contributes earnings data to the Scorecard for certain cohorts of students identified by the DOE Federal Student Aid office. Counts and median earnings are computed basedon various indicators. Because the data resides on a public-facing website, it is imperative to protect the confidentiality of the Federal Tax Information (FTI) for individuals in the cohorts. Given the complexity of breakouts requested by DOE, we will employ a statistical disclosure limitation methodology based on differentially private algorithms.

Contractor support is required to develop a calculator tool throughwhich SOI can release multiple datasets comprising both counts and medians broken down by attributes (e.g., median earnings by college, program, etc.) under a common differentially privacy budget (epsilon) to maintain the confidentiality of FTI such that the output can be released on the DOE public-facing website.

The Contractor shall:

• Provide Python code to analyze, aggregate and add noise to aggregates computed from the raw data file comprising information from both DOE and IRS.
• Work with IRS to run initial tests on the calculator and to configure and validate the schema on the IRS server.
• Provide IRS with a excel macros to estimate error rates for user-input breakouts at various epsilon levels…

More here.

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