The IRS has lost more than 2,100 IT employees this year through deferred resignation and other forms of attrition. Image: Castleski/Shutterstock.com
Changes in direction have contributed to delaying an IRS project to retire legacy IT systems—a need common across federal agencies—and recent staff cuts could have the same effect moving forward, an inspector general report has said.
The report said that in 2022 the agency set a policy of identifying and decommissioning legacy case management systems under an initiative begun in 2015 called the Enterprise Case Management (ECM) program to consolidate its numerous case systems. However, the IRS “has not fully incorporated and decommissioned any legacy systems” and until it does, it will continue to incur costs of operating those systems, it said.
One issue was that in early 2023, “ECM program leadership deprioritized decommissioning legacy case management systems and instead focused on providing modernized functionalities for users.” Then last year the agency revised policies to focus on process improvement and that “did not include a decommissioning process” and earlier this year the agency changed its definition of what constitutes a legacy system that likely will change which systems have that designation, it said.
The IG added: “The recent departures of IRS IT employees may impact the IRS’s Information Technology organization and to effectively deliver its mission, including the ECM program’s ability to decommission its legacy case management systems.”
It said the IRS has lost more than 2,100 IT employees this year through deferred resignation and other forms of attrition, including some who “were either in key management positions or were individuals recruited for their expertise related to the IRS’s restructuring efforts.”
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