TIGTA also has questioned the effectiveness of the IRS’s so-called final integration test – FIT, the process used to test the functionality of hundreds of interrelated applications needed to process tax returns.
Following a review of the FIT conducted prior to the start of the 2014 filing season, TIGTA said the IRS’s Enterprise Operations organization and the Wage and Investment Division withdrew their technical support from the FIT program prior to the completion of the tests.
That early loss of support resulted in unplanned deviations from the FIT test plan, as not all tests could be completed as planned. Further, the IRS does not have a formal process to evaluate, compare, and synchronize the FIT test environment with the filing season environment, according to TIGTA. (The Integrated Customer Communications Environment was also not included in the FIT test environment.)
Further, TIGTA said test analysts had problems accessing an employee user portalas well as an integrated enterprise portal, which caused interruptions in the performance of the processing year 2014 FIT.
IRS management agreed with recommendations to provide the necessary level of business unit support to the FIT, to establish performance goals and metrics for the annual FIT program, and to implement the environment comparison and synchronization process between the FIT program’s test environment and the filing season environment.
However, management also cautioned that implementation of these recommendations is partly contingent on the availability of funds.