Notice ID: 2032H5-24-Q-00080
Internal Revenue Services (IRS) expects to deploy Digitalization Service to enhance the taxpayer and tax professional experiences and obtain Contractor support with a comprehensive solution, which adheres to the agency’s standards and guidance, and aligns with and supports the Taxpayer Experience Strategy (TXS).
Digital Support Service Programs
With over 240 million tax filings in the United States every year, the IRS is emphasizing the use of technology to be smarter, faster, and completely accessible to its customers. The goal is to provide taxpayer’s access to their tax account information twenty-four hours per day both online and through mobile devices. The Digital Services Program provides modern, online, and mobile products with increasingly robust capabilities such as tax account status, payment functionality, and on-demand self-service. Key drivers include:
- Increasing satisfaction among all individual taxpayer groups by ensuring taxpayer self-service needs are met efficiently and effectively online
- Reducing call volumes and manpower support required by providing an improved online user experience
- Consolidating IRS service options to a centrally accessible location online by positioning self-service as the primary channel for all taxpayer interactions with the IRS
- Automating the authorized disclosure of tax information to third parties
- Authentication of users of electronic services accounts
- Allows tax professionals to access their client data, make changes, and communicate with the IRS online
- Provide taxpayers personalized/seamless online experience
- Chat Bot (Virtual Assist): Chat bot to attempt to answer questions or direct tax professional to helpful information on IRS.gov or to their online account based on a taxpayer’s browsing preferences on IRS.gov. Chat bots will also be able to connect taxpayers to an IRS assistor for a web chat. If the chatbot cannot resolve a taxpayer’s issue, contact routing will guide the taxpayer to live support from an IRS employee.
- AI-Powered Digital Appointments: Allows taxpayers to speak with an assistor or schedule an appointment if the chatbot is unable to resolve a taxpayer’s issue.
- AI-Powered Employee Assistant: Supports IRS employees when answering taxpayers’ questions with an AI-powered knowledge base that will make suggestions based on a taxpayer’s experience, questions or pages visited on IRS.gov
- Provide online services to underserved communities are not limited to but include:
- Translate Forms, Publications and Notices: Support translation of forms and tax information to taxpayers with limited English proficiency. Increase the languages (Spanish, Chinese Traditional/Simplified, Korean, Russian, Vietnamese) available online.
- Section 508 Compliance: Support taxpayers with disabilities, including taxpaying populations needing special assistance due to sight, hearing, dexterity, limited mobility, and cognitive challenges.
- Collaborate with stakeholders and expand our community presence to support the unique needs of underserved communities.
Digital Services Products
The Digital Services Program is providing improvements to taxpayer service by delivering a unified Online Account product accessible through a single online account, to provide and enhance taxpayers experience via digitalization and transformation. Online Account is the first product delivered in 2019. Additional prioritized products/capabilities that will be added to be determined in IT Mod Plan such as the following but not limited to:
- Individual Online Account (IOLA) which formally named as Online Account with components including Digital Notices & Letters (DN&L), Modernized Online Payment Plan, Integrated Payment, etc.
- Tax Professional Account (TPA)
- Business Tax Account (BTA)
- Digital Transformation (DT)
- Integrated Customer Communication Environment (ICCE)
- Enterprise Digital Communication Platform Integration
- Other modernization programs for digitalization
In addition, the digital services program will include the O&M support to sustain digital service products in production. The contractors shall deliver IT solutions accordingly to the IT Modernization Plan scope and timeline.
Digital Services Organization
The program management offices (PMO) operate as a “prime integrator” across Business and IT Delivery Partners in the organization across the Enterprise to deliver digital service-based applications as outlined in the following figure.
The PMO performs the following services:
- Manages the execution of the program and is accountable for overall Program success
- Acts as the front door between IT and the Business
- Manages and executes the Product Roadmap & Release Plan
- Communicates and integrates across the Enterprise
- Executes the governance framework
- Manages scope, schedule, and cost associated with application delivery
- Coordinates resource and risk management
Program Delivery Cadence
The PMO has drawn upon best industry practices in agile development to pilot the delivery process. However, the operating model is not limited to Agile but other frameworks to deliver faster and sooner. In principle it consists of a Governance and Investment cadence and a Development/Delivery cadence, utilizes industry best practices, and is tailored to meet the IRS governance and compliance needs …
The anticipated period of performance for this BPA contract is one (1) twelve (12) month base and four (4) twelve (12) month option years. For task order level awards, the period of performance may extend beyond twelve (12) months based on the requirements.
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