IRS Sources Sought: Continuing Education (CE) Provider Registration and Tracking System

Notice ID: 07092024_CE

This is a Sources Sought Notice (SSN) for Continuing Education (CE) Provider Registration and Tracking System. (An RFI was previously issued (Special Notice ID# 05062024) for industry information and feedback. This RFI closed 5/20/24). For this SSN, we are only seeking responses from small businesses.

The IRS is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury and one of the world’s most efficient tax administrators. The Return Preparer Office’s (RPO) mission is to improve taxpayer compliance by providing oversight and support of tax professionals. The RPO oversees Continuing Education (CE) programs for Enrolled Agents (EA) and Enrolled Retirement Plan Agents (ERPA). It is mandatory that EAs and ERPAs take continuing education from IRS approved CE Providers. Both EAs and ERPAs must complete 72 hours of continuing education triennially.

RPO oversees registration, testing, suitability and continuing education (CE) programs for certain groups of tax professionals. It is mandatory that these tax professionals take CE courses from IRS-approved CE providers.

The Government is seeking to continue developing and administering a similar solution once the current contract expires on August 31, 2026. Therefore, in preparation for possibly awarding a follow-on contract, the IRS is interested in identifying small businesses who can meet the following security requirements that will be required for this recompete award.

General Project Scope:

The IRS is looking to procure Contractor support to continue the registration, annual renewal, and review of CE providers. The support includes developing, hosting and maintaining a system to administer CE Provider registration/renewals, course completion records and related tasks by electronic and paper means.

*Note: Historically, this contract has been performed on a “no-cost” basis for the Government, in which the contractor will recoup all costs incurred, plus a reasonable profit, entirely through registration/renewal fees collected directly from CE providers.

The anticipated requirements are substantially as follows:

1. Application must be entirely web-based and must not require any software download and installation on government or CE provider computers.
2. Application must be compliant with the provisions of IRS Internal Revenue Manual (IRM)10.8.1Information Technology (IT) Security, Policy, and Guidance. If a cloud solution is proposed it must be compliant with IRM 10.8.24 Information Technology (IT) Security, Cloud Computing Security Policy.
3. Application must be compliant with the provisions of the most recent edition of the IRS Publication 4812. IRS Publication 4812 is IRS’ adoption of NIST 800-53 for our contractors.
4. System must be IPv6 compliant.
5. System must implement phishing resistant MFA including Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card authentication for IRS employees accessing the system.
6. System must implement auditing as required by IRM 10.8.24. All required system audit logs must be sent to the IRS Enterprise Security Audit Trails (ESAT) repository.
7. Allow CE providers to register and annually renew their registration.
8. Must be Payment Card Industry (PCI)compliant for secure payment of registration/renewal fees.
9. Include intuitive account management functions for Providers to input information and upload documents.
10. Allow IRS to review and approve Provider registration/renewal applications Online.
11. Allow other “back-office” functions for IRS to track, monitor, audit, analyze and report on Providers’ status, course offerings and other information available in the system.
12. Allow automated and ad-hoc communication with Providers via secure mailbox.
13. Generate appropriate review outcome letters (approval, rejection, etc.) and electronically transmit to Providers via secure mailbox.
14. Automatically generate Provider registration numbers for approved Providers. 1
15. Allow for a one-time receipt of historical Program data (Provider, student course completion records, etc.) from the existing system and store same in a database.
16. Receive daily Preparer Tax Identification Number (PTIN) updates from another/existing system and store same in a database.
17. Receive from Providers uploads of course completion records by PTIN and store same in a database.
18. Send course completion records to the system referenced in #12 above.
19. Display certain information about Providers and make accessible Online to the general public.
20. Operate a call center to support Providers.

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