The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) today publicly released its review of the Internal Revenue Service's TRIPLEX initiative. The TRIPLEX initiative was developed to optimize data center operations using industry best practices. The focus of TIGTA's review was on process standardization, one of three main components of the TRIPLEX initiative.

Once fully implemented, the TRIPLEX initiative will create a uniform operating environment across three IRS computing centers. This will make better use of taxpayer dollars by reducing labor costs and mitigating risks that can hamper the IRS's ability to perform its primary mission of tax collection and compliance activities.

TIGTA found that the implementation of mission-focused, enterprise-wide structures has resulted in labor costs savings and improved operations. The reduction of 129 full-time equivalent positions resulted in more than $10 million in labor savings. In addition, the IRS selected 10 processes for reengineering, and the completed and ongoing process reengineering efforts have resulted in operational improvements.

TIGTA also found that two of the process reengineering efforts were not effectively planned. As a result, the IRS may not fully realize the maximum benefits from the reengineering efforts. In addition, five of seven completed or ongoing operational processes selected for reengineering were not effectively baselined prior to the initiation of the reengineering efforts. The reengineering teams also had not implemented the performance measures that had been designed for some of these reengineering efforts.

"While savings have been realized and operations improved, additional planning and implementation is necessary to ensure ongoing and future process reengineering efforts are effectively planned and timely and successfully implemented," commented J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

TIGTA recommended that the IRS's Chief Technology Officer ensure that process reengineering teams adequately plan the scope of the effort, management timely completes the remaining process reengineering efforts, and operational processes selected for reengineering are baselined to establish the current state of the process.