WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is making significant efforts to validate the accuracy of individual taxpayer account data in its new database, the Customer Account Data Engine 2 (CADE 2), according to a new report publicly released today by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
The CADE 2 mission is to provide state-of-the-art individual taxpayer account processing that will improve service to taxpayers. It will replace the current Individual Master File (IMF) account settlement system with a relational database and become a key component of the IRS's enterprisewide, data-centric information technology strategy.
The overall audit objective was to evaluate IRS efforts to ensure that the data in the CADE 2 database are accurate and complete. The IRS requested that TIGTA evaluate the new data validation testing methodology. TIGTA performed this audit during the data validation testing process and provided the IRS with recommendations for continuous improvement.
While the CADE 2 database validation is progressing, data coverage, data defect reporting, and documentation need improvement, TIGTA found.
"Ensuring the accuracy of individual taxpayer account data on the CADE 2 database is a crucial part of the system's implementation," said J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. "Inaccurate data could delay this database from becoming the authoritative source of data, thereby increasing the cost of implementation."
TIGTA made seven recommendations to improve the database verification process. The IRS agreed with six of the report's seven recommendations. The IRS plans to maintain results for manual data validation activities, validate changes to the data fields that are not validated with automated data compare tools, develop documentation on the procedures to collect and maintain data used to support data validation metrics and the Scorecard development process, and store Scorecard source documentation.
The IRS disagreed with TIGTA's recommendation that automated data compare tools identify and report on data fields.