The agency maintains about 37,200 total web pages — of which 26,600 are web pages written in English. The rest are translations in other languages.

IRS.gov chief Angela Render said about 85% of visitors go to the agency’s top 100 English-language pages, and another 12% of traffic goes to the 900 next-most popular pages.

“The first thing you might start to think is, ‘Well, if [1,000] pages satisfy 97% of the people coming to the site, why do we have the rest? Can’t we get rid of those?’ And the answer is that we have to serve everyone. We can’t pick our verticals like a business would,” Render said Tuesday during a virtual event hosted by ACT-IAC.

About 51% of the IRS’ web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 59% of users access IRS web pages through online searches.

Among its current priorities, the IRS is tapping into billions of dollars in multi-year modernization funds to provide a higher level of customer service to taxpayers — including making its website easier to navigate.

“One thing we do know about our visitors is that they are there to complete a task. People do not come to IRS.gov for entertainment or to socialize. They are focused and if they’re not tax professionals, attorneys or the media, they may be scared and frustrated also,” Render said.

More than half of the IRS’ online audience reads at a sixth-grade level or lower. About 88% consider IRS.gov a top source for tax advice, and about 47% of taxpayers report feeling anxious when they receive any notice from the IRS.

“IRS.gov is one of those rare digital experiences that must serve all American taxpayers, whether individual business or tax professional, across all demographics and business types,” Render said.

To make the IRS website easier to use, the is holding focus groups with certain demographics, such a first-time filers, to understand their challenges navigating the website.

Based on this group’s feedback, Render said the IRS recently rewrote content on some of its top 11 webpages — which draw about 712 million pageviews each year — to appear at the top search engine results, and added nine new pages to “to fill significant content gaps, as illustrated by high search volume with poor results in external search engines.”

Within a month, the 20 rewritten or new pages drew more than 103 million views — nearly 28% of all traffic coming to irs.gov. Six of the new pages at the top 500 most viewed on IRS.gov and five more were in the top 1,000.

Karen Howard, director of the IRS Office of Online Services, said the agency is expanding its recruiting efforts across the country.

“The website is 24/4. We don’t want to overwork our existing talent, but we also want to expand and recruit from areas that have really good talent, that can help address the dynamic nature of the digital needs of the organization,” Howard said.

Howard said the IRS is also taking steps to address is tech “talent gap.”

“As the technology evolves, as tech players evolve, we have to make sure the understanding of evolution and that we have the talent and the skills — whether it’s upskilling, whether reskilling —to be able to address the needs of the taxpayer evolving and transforming in a in a more real- time manner,” she said.

As the IRS rolls out new technology to benefit taxpayers, Howard said the agency is also taking steps to ensure IRS employees also have the tools they need to do their jobs.

“There’s a saying — if the employees isn’t having a good experience, you can’t expect that to happen at the customer experience level,” Howard said. “The user experience team spends a lot of time working with our internal call center teams and recently did a huge study trying to understand some of the journeys that employees go through, so that we can better design and improve design on some of our existing applications.”

Among those tools, the IRS is using artificial intelligence to improve its digital experience.

Render said the IRS can use AI to reduce time spent on certain tasks, such as qualitative data analysis. AI can also assess content on the IRS website against governmentwide standards, or review conversations between a taxpayer and a chatbot that require an IRS employee to intervene.

“We understand that AI is not a magic wand that will relieve us of the responsibility of monitoring and improving our content, Render said. “I don’t see AI and technology as a replacement for a human, but rather as a toll that will allow us to address content more efficiently.”

Render said the IRS is already fielding AI technology, in the form of chatbots and voice bots.

“While AI happens to be on everybody’s minds right now, it’s not new technology,” Render said.

Render said the IRS, “for a number of years,” has used AI to look through call center logs and identify patterns.

“We reviewed call center logs to understand what people call about and then use this information to see if the information available on the website is findable and useful. This uncovered many pain points. That’s not to say we don’t want people to call, there are many instances where the call is important. What we don’t want is a situation where people must call when they don’t have to. A lot of people would like to just take care of things on their own time. And we should support this,” she said.

The post IRS has 37,000 webpages. About 2% get nearly all of its traffic first appeared on Federal News Network.

Comprehensive data management is key to unlocking seamless, personalized and secure CX for government agencies. Real-time data empowers informed, rapid decision-making, which can improve critical, high-impact federal services where time is of the essence, such as in response to a natural disaster. Alarmingly, only 13% of federal agency leaders report having access to real-time data, and 73% feel they must do more to leverage the full value of data across their agency.

While some agencies are making progress in their IT modernization journeys, they continue to struggle when it comes to quickly accessing the right data due to numerous factors, from ineffective IT infrastructure to internal cultural barriers.

Actionable intelligence is paramount. The ultimate goal is to access the right data at the right moment to generate insights at “the speed of relevance,” as leaders at the Defense Department would say. To achieve the speed of relevance required to make real-time, data-driven decisions, agencies can take steps to enable quicker access to data, improve their data hygiene, and secure their data.

How to effectively intake and store troves of data

From a data infrastructure perspective, the best path to modernized, real-time deployment is using hyper automation and DevSecOps on cloud infrastructures. Many federal agencies have begun this transition from on-premises to cloud environments, but there’s still a long way to go until this transition is complete government-wide.

Implementing a hybrid, multi-cloud environment offers agencies a secure and cost-effective operating model to propel their data initiatives forward. By embracing standardization and employing cloud-agnostic tools for automation, visibility can be enhanced across systems and environments, while simultaneously adhering to service-level agreements and ensuring the reliability of data platforms. Once a robust infrastructure is in place to store and analyze data, agencies can turn their attention to data ingestion tools.

Despite many agency IT leaders utilizing data ingestion tools such as data lakes and warehouses, silos persist. Agencies can address this interoperability challenge by prioritizing flexible, scalable and holistic data ingestion tools such as data mesh. Data mesh tools, which foster a decentralized data management architecture to improve accessibility, can enable agency decision-makers to capitalize on the full spectrum of available data, while still accommodating unique agency requirements.

To ensure data is accessible to decision-makers, it’s important that the data ingestion mechanism has as many connectors as possible to all sources of data that an agency identifies. Data streaming and data pipelines can also enable real-time insights and facilitate faster decision-making by mitigating manual processes. Data streaming allows data to be ingested from multiple systems, which can build a single source of trust for analytical systems. Additionally, these practices limit data branching and siloes, which can cause issues with data availability, quality and hygiene.

Data hygiene and security enable transformative benefits

Data hygiene is imperative, particularly when striving to ethically and accurately utilize data for an autonomous system like AI or ML. A robust data validation framework is necessary to improve data quality. To create this framework, agencies can map their data’s source systems and determine the types of data they expect to yield, but mapping becomes increasingly arduous as databases continue to scale.

One critical success factor is to understand the nature of the data and the necessary validations prior to ingesting the data into source systems. Hygiene can be improved by consuming the raw data into a data lake and then, during conversion, validate the data’s quality before applying any analytics or crafting insights.

In addition to data hygiene, data security must remain a top priority across the federal government as agencies move toward real-time data insights. Adopting a hybrid, multi-cloud environment can lead to a stronger security posture because there are data encryption capabilities inherent in enterprise cloud environments.

Agencies may consider using a maturity model to help their teams assess data readiness and how they are progressing in their cybersecurity frameworks. A maturity model lets agencies identify and understand specific security gaps at each level of the model and provides a roadmap to address these gaps. Ultimately, the cybersecurity framework is as essential as data hygiene to ensure agencies can harness data reliably and efficiently.

When agencies have data management solutions that reduce the friction of navigating siloed government systems and enable faster, more secure collaboration, it enables them to drive innovation. This is especially true for agencies that handle extensive amounts of data. For example, many High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) must manage vast amounts of citizen data to provide critical, public-facing services with speed and scale.

Data is the foundation for modern digital government services. Once data is ingested, stored and secured effectively, the transformational potential of emerging technologies such as AI or RPA can be unlocked. Moreover, with real-time data insights, government decision-makers can use actionable intelligence to improve federal services. It’s essential that agency IT leaders invest in a robust data management strategy and modern data tools to ensure they can make informed decisions and benefit from the power of AI to achieve mission-critical outcomes for the American public.

Joe Jeter is senior vice president of federal technology at Maximus.

The post Robust data management is key to harnessing the power of emerging technologies first appeared on Federal News Network.

The VA is looking at how smart home technologies and wearables like smartwatches could flag when aging and disabled veterans are having a medical emergency.

Joseph Ronzio, VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, said the department is also taking steps to ensure veterans have a stay in who gets this data, and how it may be used.

“Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service,” Ronzio said during a Federal News Network-moderated panel discussion at ATARC’s DevSecOps Summit.

“Most of the time we’re not able to access that digital footprint because it’s kept in a cloud service or a cloud system, and that’s masking to us what’s going on,” he added. “We’ve been able to implement some technologies that have actually been able to unmask it, and then evaluate what is the best kind of healthy and then start detecting where there’s problems.”

This use case hits close to home for VA’s tech leadership. VA’s Chief Health Technology Officer Craig Luigart is a disabled veteran.

Ronzio said Luigart’s Apple Watch has saved his life “multiple times already,” by alerting family members when he’s experienced a medical emergency — and that the same technology can help veterans continue to live in their own homes.

“As we look more and more towards our veteran population who are aging in place and look at the need for skilled nursing beds and skilled nursing facilities over the long haul, or nursing homes, there’s definitely a need for this capability to be refined and developed,” Ronzio said.

The VA pays for disability modifications to veterans’ houses and provides veterans with accessible equipment.

“We are providing those sensors and those technologies. Now we just have to peel the onion on this and start building better algorithms to detect and share that data with caregivers – whether that’s a spouse, whether that’s a child, whether it’s a loved one, whether it’s a friend of the family,” Ronzio said.

As VA continues to develop this project, Ronzio said veterans get to decide who they wish to share data and alerts with, so that that person can support them.

“Everyone always talks about sending data to VA, but we are not ambulance crews, we’re not 9-1-1,” he said. “We need to interact with family members. Having this data available to the family, so that they can understand if that patient’s at a dehydration risk, [or] a fall risk, having mobility challenges, needs to go through advanced rehab — that they can live a happier and healthier life within their home, instead of being put off into a skilled nursing facility or even hospice at a time.”

Ronzio said veterans will always have a say in how their personal data is used.

“Having those data controls in place is tremendously important. From my perspective, I wouldn’t want all of my home data, all of my sleep data, all of my stuff, getting out there to anyone,” he said.

“As we talked about smart homes, my goal has always been to keep the data local to the person’s house. I don’t even want people sharing their data 100% with their medical staff. If you have a problem, we would be pushing out analytics that your devices can analyze your data with. And once you hit a tripwire or you hit a concern, you can select that you just want to share it with your loved ones,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the VA is setting up a Digital Health Office.

“This realignment is going to align a lot of virtual, a lot of AI, and a lot of technologies that typically had responsibilities in other places, into one area,” Ronzio said.

The creation of the Digital Health Office, he added, will impact the reporting structure of several hundred officials within the VA’s Central Office.

“It’s a major change to the organization. They’re moving a lot of different arms of VA under a Digital Health Officer. We have actings and interims in these positions right now for all the senior executives, so we’re still trying to figure out what this is really going to mean for the workforce,” Ronzio said.

VA’s Office of Information and Technology will remain its own separate entity, but Ronzio said the Digital Health Office will allow for greater collaboration with OIT.

“I’m hoping that we can actually improve the speed and efficiency of OIT’s processes to have secure systems rolled out. I’d anticipate that we can save some time just by having our internal communication. But if we can actually develop better relationships with OIT, this will have the potential to have dramatic results,” he said.

“Some of my projects in the past have taken two or three years to manifest. Now that we have access to people in our own organization and have more communication at the undersecretary level and above for digital health, this should actually speed up our iteration and speed up our ability to produce something,” he added.

The post VA looking at ‘smart home’ tech to keep aging, disabled vets living independently first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that Oregon will opt into Direct File next year, and expects other states will also do so ahead of the next filing season.

The IRS announced last week it will make its Direct File platform a permanent option for taxpayers to file their federal tax returns, after piloting the system this year with 12 states.

More than 140,000 taxpayers used the platform to file federal tax returns this year — exceeding the IRS’ goal of 100,000 users. About 19 million taxpayers living in those 12 states were eligible to use Direct File this year.

The Treasury Department expects at least 580,000 Oregon residents will be eligible to use the free online filing tool next filing season.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told reporters that Direct File will give taxpayers more options to file their taxes.

“Direct File is long overdue. It’s the kind of public service the government ought to be providing to Americans and Oregonians whenever they can,” Wyden said in a call Tuesday.

At a committee hearing at the end of this year’s filing season, Wyden praised the IRS for creating a free website that allows taxpayers to file their federal tax returns.

“The website was user-friendly, quick and easy to use. I went out and talked to some of those people who used it, and that was the answer that I got,” he said. “It didn’t hassle users with up charges for add-on services they didn’t need. It got overwhelmingly positive reviews. With Direct File, I believe the IRS has built a good tool that people are going to like, because it saves time, headaches and money.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement that expanding Direct File will help taxpayers save time and money, “and ensure they receive the tax benefits they are owed.

“After a successful pilot this Filing Season, we are pleased to expand the program as a permanent offering and welcome Oregon as the first new state to offer this free new option to taxpayers,” Yellen said.

The IRS is adding more states to Direct File as House Republicans propose defunding the program.

The House Appropriations Committee released a fiscal 2025 spending bill earlier this month week that would cut IRS funding by nearly 18% and zero out funding for Direct File.

The full committee advanced the bill last week, and awaits a House floor vote.

Wyden told reporters he’ll “fight with everything I’ve got to protect Direct File.”

“If Republicans in the Congress have the opportunity, they are going to put an end to it,” he said.

Congressional Republicans have called Direct File wasteful and duplicative, since some tax software companies already allow taxpayers below a certain income threshold to file online for free through the Free File Alliance program. 

The IRS and U.S. Digital Service spent a combined $31.8 million to launch the Direct File pilot.

However, Wyden said taxpayers deserve more options in how they choose to file.

Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, no longer participates in the IRS Free File program. But Intuit notified some taxpayers in Oregon that its TurboTax software might not have selected the best deduction option, resulting in a possible overpayment to the state.

The state of Oregon says this issue affects about 12,000 of its residents.

“It was another example of how the big software companies have been upcharging for products that aren’t that great to begin with,” Wyden said.

States that opt into Direct File have options in how they participate.

During the Direct File pilot, taxpayers in Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, and California were directed to a state-run tool to complete their state tax returns, after they filed their federal tax returns.

Taxpayers in Arizona, Massachusetts, and New York were also able to import their information from Direct File directly into the state-run platform, making it faster to file their state tax returns.

“Moving from Direct File to the state tool went very smoothly. Taxpayers were able to bring their information with them. It was able to prepopulate a lot of the information needed for a state tax return. And then taxpayers had to answer just a couple of additional state-specific questions to complete the filing of their state return,” an administration official told reporters.

The IRS limited participation in this year’s  Direct File pilot to taxpayers only reporting certain income types, such as wages on a Form W-2, and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.

“Over the next few years, the goal is that direct files eligibility is expanded to cover the most common tax situations, especially those that affect working families,” another administration official told reporters.

The post IRS adds another state to Direct File, as House Republicans seek to defund it first appeared on Federal News Network.

After June 2024, the National Archives and Records Administration will no longer accept analog records into their collections. Agencies across the country are tasked with transitioning paper and physical records into digital formats. One of those agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has already taken significant steps to meet those requirements.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility corporation, provides services to Tennessee, along with portions of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, a population of approximately 10 million customers. With that mission comes the responsibility to collect, maintain and provide public access to an enormous and ever-growing number of records and documents like annual and quarterly reports, bond offerings, notice of reservoir levels, maps, charts, models and other general information.

“Over the last five years, we’ve consistently generated around five million electronic records a year. That’s just under about 10 terabytes of records. Now overall, on any given day, we manage around 200 million temporary and permanent records that are in various stages of the records management lifecycle,” said Rebecca Coffey, Tennessee Valley Authority agency records officer and senior manager of enterprise records, on Federal Insights – Records Management.

Temporary and permanent records

The TVA, like most agencies, manages a collection of temporary and permanent records. The process for disposition of records is public to provide stakeholders continued access to where they are in the records management lifecyle.

“An agency will prepare a proposed schedule, send it to their designated archivist. Once we get an informal nod that this looks good and it aligns with other agencies, then those schedules get published in the Federal Register, and the public and other federal agencies have a chance to comment on them.” Coffey said

Records are made up of a variety of formats. What were primarily reports on paper make up about 70% of what is generated at TVA. The other 30%, considered mixed media, consists of text messages, emails, instant message chats, maps, photographs and other data streams that are generated as TVA conducts its work, like monitoring river levels.

“When they go to NARA for the final approval, they will decide the time frame. If the records have significant value, historical value, whether they are telling the story of TVA or the impact in the national story, the federal records will become permanent, which means that at a designated time, they will get sent to NARA. We will turn over ownership of those records to the National Archives,” Coffey said, on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “We obviously have different plans for how we’re going to manage those records, and it changes every year. With new technology comes new formats.”

Digital Transformation

“NARA is not focused so much on ‘have you digitized everything by this deadline,’ as much as it is ‘what is your plan,’ because obviously, across the federal agencies we don’t all have the resources to be able to implement it immediately,” Coffey said.

Agencies must also contend with digital records organization. Once transformed from paper to a digital entity, documents must also be encoded with metadata to make it searchable and easily retrieved when needed. NARA works as a partner for agencies in the digitization process. In the past, most records could be counted on to be a printout, but that has changed. Following directives from NARA and the Office of Management and Budget in 2011 and beyond, requiring an overhaul of records management, TVA has been operating under a series of initiatives.

“I’m really proud of the work our TVA team is doing. This has to do with some of our cultural resource records, our mapping and aerial photographs. We have a collection that goes back 100 years, and obviously those are not going to be the easiest things to digitize. We have our project: We are processing over a million frames of film and about 300,000 hard-copy maps. And what the team has done is they’ve thought about not just how we use them today, but how we could possibly use them in the future,”  Coffey said.

The post Tennessee Valley Authority takes on NARA’s digitization mandate first appeared on Federal News Network.

During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top federal and industry technology experts:

• David Larrimore, Chief Technology Officer, Department of Homeland Security
• Kaschit Pandya, Chief Technology Officer, Internal Revenue Service
• Doug Robertson, Chief Technology Officer, Small Business Administration
• Christopher Wallace, Chief of Cybersecurity and Chief Technology Officer, Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems
• Adam Clater, Chief Architect, North American Public Sector, Red Hat
• Greg Carl, Principal Technologist, Pure Storage
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

Panelists also will share lessons learned, challenges and solutions, and a vision for the future.

The post Federal Executive Forum CTO’s Profiles in Excellence in Government 2024: Innovation and Emerging Technologies first appeared on Federal News Network.

The agency’s Document Upload Tool is giving taxpayers an online option to submit required documents to the IRS when they get a notice from the tax agency in the mail.

Taxpayers no longer have to snail-mail their documents, and they can expect a faster response from the agency. The IRS launched the Document Upload Tool in 2021, and recently received its millionth submission from the tool.

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement that the Document Upload Tool “is a key part of our ambitious initiative to transform the IRS into a virtually paperless agency, and we continue to see increased use of this by taxpayers.”

Wanda Brown, project director of Inflation Reduction Act Implementation within the IRS’ Wage and Investment division, called the 1 million submissions a “big milestone” for the Document Upload Tool.

“Consider the fact that we get a lot of paper in from the mail, this is making a dent in that,” Brown said on June 5 in a panel discussion on IRS IT modernization hosted by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

The IRS estimates more than 94% of individual taxpayers no longer need to send mail to the agency, and that 125 million pieces of correspondence can be submitted digitally each year.

“People say, ‘Oh, you’re just digitizing paper. Yes, but we’re providing access to it,” said Darnita Trower, the director of emerging programs and initiatives at the IRS. “Think about all the times a taxpayer has called and you need something. Someone somewhere has to make a request to files, to go pull the file and get that piece of paper. We are now providing data at your fingertips. You can just go to the screen search for it and render it as long as you have the security rights to do so.”

Brown and Trower are both finalists for this year’s Service to America Medals program — in addition to Gerald Johnson, an IRS IT specialist.

A backlog of paper-based tax returns and correspondence hobbled the IRS at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Taxpayer Advocate went so far as to call paper the agency’s “kryptonite.”

For taxpayers who still prefer filing paper tax returns, Trower said the IRS is working on being able to digitize that paper return.

“If you choose to send us the paper, we will process it. But we are ushering in some nice tools with the modernization. We don’t intend to have people continue keying in tax returns manually. We want to scan and extract that data,” she said.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found the IRS received about 1.2 million paper tax returns during this year’s filing season. That’s about an 8.5% reduction from the more than 1.3 million paper tax returns it handled the previous year.

“We are actively working on one of our initiatives, so that for taxpayers that choose to send in their tax return to us via paper, that we’re able to take that and really put it into a digital format and process it through our downstream systems,” Trower said.

The IRS is also scanning and digitizing some of the paper documents at its service centers.

“It’s a two-pronged approach – reducing the amount of paper that we have coming into the organization and files that we’re storing. Being able to scan some of that paper, that helps us to make data available, information and images available for our employees, so they can assist the taxpayers,” Brown said.

The IRS sends out about 3,600 notices and letters to taxpayers. But as of April this year, the agency now has 20 of its most commonly used forms available to fill out and submit on mobile devices.

“Taxpayers can go to IRS.gov, pull down their form, enter it on any device. It’s adaptive – and be able to just hit submit,” Brown said.

Trower said the IRS plans to make an additional 150 forms mobile-adaptive over the next calendar year.

“The majority of those that require a response, you can just go to any device and upload and provide your response to the IRS,” she said.

The IRS is also taking steps to modernize and improve its internal systems, in an effort to provide better customer service to taxpayers.

The agency is looking to consolidate its 63 legacy case management systems into one enterprise case management system.

The IRS has been working on moving to a single enterprise case management for years. Trower said the next step is to roll out a digital inventory management system.

“That will allow us to have enhanced workflows, get things where they need to be, if it landed in the wrong bucket, we can redirect it. But more importantly, when it comes to case management, we’re building it on the same platform as enterprise case management,” she said.

The IRS next year will also test out a long-awaited update to the Individual Master File, its authoritative data source for individual tax account data.

The IRS expects to turn on a modernized version of the IMF for the first time in April 2024 – after the tax filing season — and run it in parallel with its legacy system. Werfel said the IRS hopes to have the updated IMF up and running by the following filing season.

Trower said the IMF serves as the backbone of the filing season, and modernizing the legacy system will give IRS employees “real-time access to all the data that they need to be able to do their job.”

She added that the updated IMF will also give taxpayers better access to their own history of interactions with the IRS — and the status of receiving those.

“You should be able to upload something from your phone and log into your account and see, ‘Here’s my upload that’s tied to this notice that I received,’ and maybe get some of your own questions answered — like, ‘Did you get it?’ That’s probably a common question — ‘I sent something in the mail. Did you get it?’” Trower said.

Jessica Lucas-Judy, director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, said the IRS, as it modernizes its legacy IT infrastructure, should also address the fact that it doesn’t have a comprehensive inventory of systems that contain taxpayer information.

“It’s very difficult to know if you are being successful in protecting that information if you don’t know where it is,” Lucas-Judy said.

GAO recommends the IRS complete a comprehensive inventory of where it stores taxpayer information.

Much of the IRS’ ongoing IT modernization efforts are supported by the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives the agency about $60 billion in multi-year modernization funds.

The legislation provided $4.8 billion in business systems modernization at the IRS.

“Consistent funding for the IRS is key. Right now, with the IRA, we’re able to make leaps and strides in that space. With the funding, we can do the right planning, we can incorporate new technology,” Trower said.

The post IRS hit a ‘big milestone’ to wean itself off paper. What comes next? first appeared on Federal News Network.

A pivotal deadline looms large for federal agencies: digital message compliance. Starting June 30, 2024, all federal agencies will be required to archive agency records digitally. That’s right, the end of paper culture is finally here. But for far too long, there’s been a lot of confusion over what exactly digital messages entail, what the expectations are for reporting them and a lack of tools to submit data to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in a way that’s easy, secure and proactive. And to further complicate things, NARA broadened the meaning of digital messages in January 2023 to include text messages, so there’s yet another factor to consider. Let’s focus on text messages since that’s the latest addition.

So many important business transactions, official policies and decisions are done via texting, so failing to archive them can make it hard to stay transparent, accountable and in compliance with the law. Once NARA’s deadline hits, non-compliance can lead to information gaps during federal investigations, create PR headaches, and potentially result in substantial fines and penalties.

Understanding NARA’s text message regulations

So, what exactly is NARA tracking? Text messages from federal workers are deemed public records and must be archived. NARA is expecting access to digital messages sent or received by federal employees, including SMS and MMS messages – meaning photos, videos, voice notes and even emojis. Considering these different types of messages plus the fact that they need to be monitored across agency networks, personal devices and different phone operating systems like Android and iOS means there are several layers of complexity to navigate.

NARA also expects agencies to retain metadata associated with these texts. Including timestamps, device information, attachments and even emoji reactions. Yes, you read that right – even a simple thumbs-up emoji might serve as evidence in a federal case.

The NARA guidelines recommend evaluating whether messages need to be archived based on whether they contain:

• Evidence of agency policies, business or mission
• Information that is exclusively available in electronic messages
• Official agency information
• A business need for the information

It’s clear that federal agencies are facing an increasingly complex and dynamic digital landscape filled with constantly changing expectations. Outdated processes are no match for this complexity, and they’re holding agencies back from staying compliant. The answer? Solutions that do the heavy lifting. To make life easier, agencies should have a platform that automatically captures text messages, images, and videos, and is tightly integrated with their wireless provider. It should also leverage the latest security protocols and make it easy to generate reports that are audit ready.

Streamlining text message archiving for federal agencies

Companies like 3rd Eye Technologies have spent years perfecting a solution to keep data safe for federal organizations, including agencies in charge of the highest levels of national security and intelligence. That’s why T-Mobile teamed up with the mobile solutions provider to make it as easy as possible for federal customers to know that the data they’re archiving is not only easy to manage but safe.

Mystic Messaging Archival is a turn-key solution from 3rd Eye Technologies that specializes in securely capturing and archiving texts – that includes SMS and MMS message logs for federal and enterprise customers. Mystic is fully integrated into the T-Mobile network, meaning there is no need for any additional applications or software on the phone, making implementation across the agency simple and swift once the agency purchases the solution from 3rd Eye Technologies or T-Mobile. And because the solution is configured at the network level, it is archiving every SMS/MMS message in real-time and is storing them securely for reporting, so the messages do not need to be self-reported unless specified by agency protocols. The messages then travel over 5G where they’re archived in a hosted cloud and the data remains owned by the agency.

Mystic’s cloud-based solution is also “FedRAMP Ready” in the FedRAMP marketplace, which means it is ready for Agency Authority to Operate (ATO). Not all archiving solutions have that distinction due to the highly rigorous standards involved, so it’s a major advantage. And when pairing Mystic technology with T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G network and 5G standalone technology, messages are transmitted over a secure channel, enhancing protection against vulnerabilities such as cyber attacks (commonly found in Wi-Fi networks).

Mystic also ensures that SMS/MMS data from any lost, stolen, or damaged mobile device is automatically archived, safeguarding information despite the physical status of the device.

Preparing for NARA compliance

Mystic’s eDiscovery console – the mechanism that actually generates the reports — is designed to streamline the entire process of collecting, storing, managing, securing and reviewing text messages from mobile devices. This centralized reporting console consolidates all data from subscribed agency enterprise mobile devices. This console is accessible by the Agency Headquarters, allowing for efficient management and oversight of all archived communications. This way agencies can quickly and easily respond to all types of legal requests, investigations or regulatory requirements. And because Mystic and T-Mobile are already tightly integrated through the 5G network, getting set up takes only 10 days or less.

Here’s the bottom line: agencies need to move fast. The NARA deadline is close and the right tools and partners will make all the difference in preparing for it. The clock is ticking, but it’s not too late to get ahead of the game with a solution that makes text archiving easy, integrates into your existing processes seamlessly and stays up to date with the latest guidelines so you don’t have to.

The post Countdown to Compliance: Understanding NARA’s rules for text messaging first appeared on Federal News Network.

From virtual desktops to email and collaboration, the Navy has been leaning heavily on cloud services to speed up its digital modernization efforts. But those efforts have come with a big question: Will any of this work aboard ships? It turns out the answer is yes.

In a pilot project, the Navy has shown it’s possible to consistently move several terabytes of data each day between the cloud and thousands of users onboard an aircraft carrier every single day, an advance officials say is a “game changer”

The project is called Flank Speed Edge, an extension of Flank Speed, the Navy’s broader cloud environment. The largest test case has been aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which is currently underway in the Pacific, and represents the first major example of the Navy connecting a vessel at sea with cloud services in a way that’s on par with what sailors get on shore.

Leveraging P-LEO satellites

It’s mostly thanks to the advent of Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (P-LEO) satellite services — massive constellations of small satellites that form mesh networks via optical links with one another in space, and deliver high-bandwidth, low latency communications to users back on Earth.

Cmdr. Kevin White, the combat systems officer aboard the Lincoln, said the initial idea was to install a gigabit’s worth of satellite connectivity aboard the ship and see what the ship’s 5,000 sailors and Marines could do with it. It turns out, quite a lot.

“I’ve seen a tremendous value from from this afloat. All of the staff are using their Flank Speed capabilities to maintain continuity,” he told the Navy CIO’s recent IT conference in Norfolk, Virginia, during a live video demonstration from the Pacific Ocean. “They’re using their NMCI phones to call home over voice over IP, or to call the beach to say, ‘Hey, I need this part rushed to the ship.’ We’re using it across all of our departments and embarked commands for quality-of-work type areas. Everything from our training department — ensuring that all of our readiness in our training cycle is up to date — to our medical department, to our supply department, they’re all reaching out over websites and services to ensure that we have continuity of operations, and ensure that this ship is ready to go when the time comes that we have to turn these services off.”

One thing the Navy has learned from the Lincoln experience is that Flank Speed Edge doesn’t require a huge amount of manpower. It’s taken just three full-time sailors to operate and maintain the new satellite and Wi-Fi infrastructure aboard the carrier.

And in return, it’s also dramatically expanded the kinds of software upgrades and updates that can be performed on other systems on the ship, White said. Traditionally, that’s the kind of work that can only be done at a pier with a physical network connection.

“While we’re out at sea right now, with this P-LEO capability, a cloud connected node and all the right elements in place, we’re able to scale new capabilities as they become available and rapidly deploy them while they’re monitored from the shore side,” he said. “One of the big challenges we have is the cycle of Windows updates and the cycle of patches, and with that high-speed capability, we can have those update services enabled. Onboard, we have 2,000 staff folks, all of which are live at their home commands on Flank Speed. Imagine a future where we are able to migrate that data to an embarkable [laptop], and allow them to interoperate with that data when we have to turn off our connections.”

The approach does have its limitations. Besides the obvious need to sometimes shut down those high-speed data links for operational reasons — leaving the ship with only its onboard tactical cloud nodes — the P-LEO connections, so far, are only authorized for unclassified data.

But White said the on-board infrastructure is designed to be transport agnostic — so that it can use whatever connectivity mechanism is available — from traditional military SATCOM to commercial services like Starlink. It’s also designed to incorporate software defined networking, so that the network capacity available through those data links can be used however the Navy sees fit, and can be reallocated on the fly.

“Right now our logs are showing that we’re able to pass between 3 and 5 terabytes of data per day, which is absolutely massive. And what we’re able to do with software defined networks is scale exactly how that data is used,” he said. “Right now we’re demonstrating pushing applications like air wing maintenance apps that live in the cloud, and all of our pay and personnel apps. And that’s just scratching the surface.”

Other applications ashore

The Navy is using similar concepts in other places of the world that may not be as hard to connect as ships, but still have tended to have communications challenges.

The service’s 5th Fleet is serving as a pilot site for a shore-based implementation of Flank Speed Edge. At the command’s headquarters in Bahrain, staff have recently started using Flank Speed services, including Nautilus Virtual Desktop.

Lt. Cmdr. Tricia Nguyen, a staff member at Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Bahrain said so far, the Flank Speed approach has turned out to be more seamless and resilient than the Navy’s traditional overseas networks.

“It is a vast improvement compared to the previous assets and legacy architecture,” she said. “The user interface is quick and responsive — applications are able to be opened natively instead of using browser-based workarounds. Simple things matter here: The file sync is seamless. I don’t have to log in multiple times like I used to; now I just boot up and my files are there. And back in March, there was a Teams service outage, which I understand was worldwide. However, here in Bahrain, we did not experience an outage at all. That was because of the architecture: We have a primary and secondary means of transport that are terrestrial based, and a tertiary that’s commercial satellite. We had an automatic failover and it was completely seamless and transparent to our end users. I didn’t even know about it until after the fact.”

Bob Stephenson, the chief information officer for U.S. Pacific Fleet, said some of what the Navy has learned through the pilots — especially their uses of secure WiFi — may also be applicable to communications on installations, such as his command’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor.

“We’ve been using the same technology in our buildings that we’ve used since the late 90s. As our staff changes and grows, it’s very difficult for us with a wired infrastructure to bring more people into the building, or rearrange the office,” he said. “So we’re doing a pilot now sponsored by PEO Digital where we’ve gone to wireless in the buildings. We still have to use fiber for our secret networks, and we’d like to change that, but this is going to give us an enormous capability to modernize our buildings like we’re modernizing our ships.”

The post Navy project brings promise of cloud to the middle of the ocean first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is giving veterans more options to get health care and benefits from the department — in some cases, through just a few taps on their smartphones.

VA’s nearly three-year-old health and benefits app recently saw more than 2 million total downloads. The app also surpassed more than a million monthly users.

Among its features, the app allows veterans to message their doctors, view upcoming health care appointments and check the status of benefits claims.

VA’s app has a 4.8-star rating on Apple’s App Store, with over 138,000 ratings, and is at 4.6 stars on Google Play, based on nearly 40,000 reviews. Those positive ratings are on par with apps such as Uber or Amazon.

Charles Worthington, VA’s chief technology officer and chief AI officer, said the app’s launch stemmed from the department’s 2018 relaunch of VA.gov and the “culmination of VA’s digital modernization effort.”

Worthington said the idea of a VA app started when VA’s Office of Information and Technology noticed a greater percentage of VA.gov traffic came from smartphones each year.

More than half of all federal website users use mobile devices.

“We saw this trend, and it led us to ask ourselves, and ultimately to ask veterans,” Worthington said. “Even though we had invested a lot of energy in making VA.gov an easy-to-use website on mobile phones, we wanted to ask ourselves the question: Is this the best experience we can provide to smartphone users?”

Christopher Johnston, VA’s deputy chief technology officer for digital experience, said younger generations of veterans are driving demand for mobile-first digital services at the VA.

“Today’s veterans are very tech savvy, and they want to be able to access these things …  in the grocery store, or at the beach with their family, or when it occurs to them, in a very, very quick and easy way,” Johnston said.

Among its features, veterans can use the app to view upcoming appointments, message their doctors and manage their prescriptions.

Veterans can also upload photos of documents and submit them as part of the disability benefits claim process. In some circumstances, the VA requests more information from veterans to complete their claims.

“The old way that would have worked is the VA sends a letter, saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got your claim. But there’s this missing piece of evidence’ — maybe a marriage certificate, or could be anything. And when the veteran receives that letter, they read it, and then they can mail it back. And you can obviously imagine how much faster that is, if suddenly now you can see in your claim status, ‘Oh, there’s this piece of evidence missing.’ And right there in the app, you can upload a document, you can take out your camera, you can take a picture of the document, hit send, and suddenly a transaction that previously would have taken days can be done in seconds,” Worthington said.

The VA OIT team said providing a higher level of customer service to veterans is part of what’s leading to higher trust scores across the department.

The VA announced last month that veteran trust scores in the department reached an all-time high of more than 80%. That’s up from 55%, when the VA first conducted this survey in 2016.

The VA is basing its scores on survey responses from more than 38,000 veterans who obtained VA services between January and March this year.

“The VA is a big place, but efforts like this are a small reason for those improvements in trust. It’s meeting veterans where they are and trying to make it easier for them to access the benefits of certain services that they’ve earned,” Worthington said.

In user feedback sessions, veterans told the VA they valued the simplicity and ease of quickly accessing some of the most common services on VA.gov — and the ability to access those services from their phones.  VA soft-launched the app in August 2021.

“We put it in the app store, but didn’t make a lot of noise about it, because obviously, we try to pilot things early in their development. And over time, we have added features and become much more public about the app,” Worthington said.

Johnston said some veterans also prefer the app because they can get push notifications.

“You can imagine that I get a push notification that says your doctor has responded to your message. I look at my phone, I’m logged in instantly. I see that response to my doctor while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. It’s all very quick and happens instantly, and reduces a lot of anxiety for veterans who are frequently waiting for responses from VA.,” Johnston said.

After logging in with a username and password or another credential, veterans can log into the app quickly using Face ID or using their fingerprint for the next 45 days.

“It’s a faster login process, once you’ve done it that first time with whichever credential you use, the same that you would use on VA.gov,” Worthington said.

Johnston said the VA OIT is making sure veterans experience a seamless transition between VA.gov and the smartphone app.

“We’re not rewriting the same things over and over again. The secure messaging system is the same secure messaging system that’s on VA.gov. It’s the same database, it’s the same business logic. It’s the same delivery groups that you can choose, and what we’re doing is creating a native mobile layer on top that reaches that same database,” Johnston said.

“It’s a lot easier for them to just open the app and get right into messaging their doctor or checking their appointments, maybe a claim status. That was one feature that people were really excited about.”

Rachel Han, a product lead with the U.S. Digital Service working with VA OIT, said the team focused on reducing the amount of time it takes for veterans to access some of the VA’s most commonly sought services.

“We really want to make sure, for example, with push notifications, or the human-centered design process, that we reduce the number of clicks and reduce the amount of time work overall,” Han said.

Han said the app also supports assistive technology, such as text-to-voice tools.

“We want to make sure that this experience is really simple for everyone. We want to make sure that the letters that veterans get from the VA can be read by mobile phone to these veterans, and that they wouldn’t have to wait in the mail for a physical letter, or ask someone who can see to read that letter to them,” she said.

Worthington said VA OIT always ensures veterans who need assistance technologies are part of the user-testing phase of the app’s features.

“That’s a real way to know for sure how well the tools are working,” he said.

The VA is looking to roll more to the mobile app later this year. They include improvements to how veterans submit travel claim submissions, in order to be reimbursed for traveling to appointments, as well as improvements to the process of submitting a disability claim.

“Those are some of the highlights that we’re looking forward to this coming year,” Worthington said.

The post How VA’s flagship app got to 2M downloads in less than 3 years first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Grants Quality Service Management Office over the last year helped several micro agencies buy award management services.

This pilot was part of how the QSMO is crawling before it tries to walk or run with larger agencies.

Andrea Sampanis, the acting director of the Grants Quality Service Management Office in the Department of Health and Human Services, said the procurement pilots with AmeriCorps, the Inter-American Foundation and the Northern Border Regional Commission opened the door to bigger possibilities to modernize federal grant services.

“We worked with them to explore the vendors on our Catalog of Market Research, making sure they were ready to meet their needs and helping to support them through the procurement process,” Sampanis said on Ask the CIO. “IAF and NBRC are live, on target and on budget, which is not an easy thing to do. AmeriCorps is expected to go live this fall. Huge kudos to these three agencies, as they were prepared to be good customers, willing to accept the system as-is and supported by great leaders in their chief information officer and chief procurement offices.  Their grants teams came together to support a great vendor product from our Catalog of Market Research.”

While the AmeriCorps, the Inter-American Foundation and the Northern Border Regional Commission are considered micro agencies, the amount of money each of them awards through grants is anything but small. Sampanis said the AmeriCorps is more like a medium-sized agency when looking at the amount of money it awards through grants. In fiscal 2024, for example, the agency expects to award $577 million in grants.

The Inter-American Foundation and NBRC are much smaller with IAF, awarding about $145 million and about $50 million in grants, respectively.

Grants QSMO aims to speed acquisition

While these three agencies don’t reach the billions HHS or the Education Department or the NASA hand out, Sampanis said demonstrating how the procurement assistance pilot works opens the door to improve and expand the QSMO’s efforts.

The QSMO marketplace current has approved seven grants management system providers and is in the middle of conducting market research to expand its services.

“We have one quote that says having access to Grants QSMO market research puts you 1,000 steps ahead in your procurement. It’s our goal to speed up the acquisition process and give agencies more buying confidence as they are pursuing a vendor on our catalog.  The vendors on our catalog are selected to support meeting grants standards and align to 2CFR 200 requirements,” Sampanis said. “It just lets them really focus their attention on a fewer number of providers to really say, ‘Hey, this solution is purpose built for grants. It’s an award management solution that is software-as-a-service and very configurable.’ It should feel easy. They don’t have to go and renegotiate a contract.”

The QSMO also works with the agency’s CIO and security leadership, helps develop performance work statements and serves as advisors during the entire acquisition phase.

“I always encourage agencies to meet with all the vendors on our Catalog of Market Research to understand what’s out there and share their specific needs. I think they learn a lot about themselves by talking to the vendors,” Sampanis said. “I helped them all the way through the pilot because I’m learning a lot. Every time I hear a contracting officer ask a new question, I think, ‘hey, that’s something I need in my catalog because that’s true.’ I always say our goal is to speed up an agency’s acquisition and give them buying confidence.”

HHS has led the Grants QSMO since January 2021 and has been building its services over the last few years.

With the Office of Management and Budget finalizing the update to the governmentwide grants guidance under 2 CFR earlier this year, standardizing certain key areas like notices of funding opportunities and overall trying to expand access to more than $1.2 trillion in grants and cooperative assistance agencies pay out each year, Sampanis said the QSMO is ready to expand its services and offerings.

Two common drivers of grants modernization

Having that baseline understanding and confidence in the marketplace is a key factor in success, said Wagish Bhartiya, the chief growth officer for REI Systems, which helps agencies modernize their grant systems.

Bhartiya said there are two basic drivers of grant modernization. The first is budget and second is technology.

“There has been a greater focus on budget and how much of our budget goes towards grant funding and how that funding is being deployed? How much of that is serving management processes, some of the overhead aspects of grant management, which will exist inherently, versus how much should be deployed into the community? That analysis, I think, is getting more acute,” he said. “The technology itself has evolved and shipped in a way that, I think, is much more possible now to be thoughtful about performance and mission. The technology is enabling some of this some of these questions to be asked because we now have the potential and the power to look at it for the first time.”

These two big trends are part of how grants providers are shifting their mindsets away from being so compliance focused to spending more time and money on measuring and ensuring outcomes.

“There’s all these dollars flowing through our grant programs so we need to start to think just as much about the downside, protecting from a compliance and a risk mitigation perspective, as the upside into the mission impact in terms of what are the tangible and successful outcomes,” Bhartiya said. “The other big theme is customer experience and user experience, and now the grantee experience.”

He said this updated point of view is part of why many grant providers are more willing to change today than ever before. He said this means the singularity of the way grants management worked over the last few decades is going away.

“Every grant program thinks they’re a snowflake and they think they’re special or unique and actually bespoke. But when you zoom out, you see that actually 85% of what a grant making agency does is essentially the same in the core lifecycle design,” he said. “Convincing them that they don’t need to make everything bespoke and tailored to the Nth degree because they can leverage best practices, use what’s worked for other agencies because there’s a chance to reduce the burden on their staff and on the recipient community is part of the challenge.”

Bhartiya added that the benefits of an end-to-end system, that’s in the cloud are becoming more clear to agencies.

The post Grants procurement pilots demonstrate speed to modernization first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Navy has a big appetite for modern technology, but also a lot of technology debt. One answer to that problem: a move to portfolio management. Officials think by focusing their acquisition management energy on portfolios, not individual products, they can embrace commercial technologies more quickly while also saying goodbye to expensive legacy systems.

The new approach is well underway within the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital), one of the Navy Department’s main organizations for buying and building enterprise IT capabilities.

It’s a departure from the Defense Department’s usual way of thinking about acquisition. Rather than program managers focusing on programs, as they’re defined in the DoD budget, they’re now in charge of portfolios of capabilities. Starting in 2021, PEO Digital eliminated its traditional program management offices and reorganized itself into eight portfolios as part of a broader initiative called modern service delivery.

“Portfolios, to me, are a way to take the burden off from a traditional program and project management view,” Louis Koplin, the office’s acting program executive director told attendees at the Navy Department CIO’s annual IT conference in Norfolk, Virginia last week. “We want those to be cohesive portfolios and products, aligned towards an integrated mission outcome view. Sometimes we’re asked to provide all of the features, and we then discover that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The portfolio view allows us to break that paradigm, and lets us shed some of that daily toil of project and program management that seems to actually impede our ability to deliver the outcomes.”

Officials say part of the goal is also to help those managers be less protective of any individual technology solution, and to adopt new ideas more quickly.

But now that the technology adoption aperture  is open a little wider, it’s also created a need for new filtering mechanisms — or “funnels” — to help the Navy understand its overall IT environment, which commercial technologies are good candidates for adoption, and when it’s time to divest legacy systems.

One way PEO Digital is doing that is through something called the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework.

“What’s great about that is it helps us find the right level of capability discussion for the right audience. If we’re going to talk to the budget folks or the congressional staffers on the hill, we can say we’ve got four major portfolio areas: digital workplace, cybersecurity, IT platforms and IT infrastructure,” Koplin said. “I can say, ‘Those are things that you care about, that I care about,’ and we can talk about where are we on the journey to improve those capability outcomes. We’re not going to talk necessarily about named products, but it gives us a way to do that. And if they say, ‘Well, what do you mean by digital workplace?’ I can say I have two product groups in there, client computing, and communication and collaboration. And this helps us consistently talk about capabilities. We’ve got things that are going to move in and out of the portfolio, and we know that by segmenting it in this way, we can consistently be prepared to do that and move the cattle through their respective chutes.”

A second big change is to start thinking about technologies in terms of four “horizons.”

Horizon 3 is made up of technologies that exist in commercial industry, and that the Navy is only starting to experiment with, through programs like Small Business Innovation Research. Horizon 2 is when the Navy has started to put more serious money into scaling a technology into pilot programs with a clear place in one of its portfolios. Horizon 1 is made up of products that are in full production mode with a focus on continuous upgrades, and Horizon 0 covers systems the Navy is ready to decommission.

And organizing technologies into that final group is critical, said Justin Fanelli, the Navy Department’s acting chief technology officer.

“Horizons is an agile framework that came from top consulting firms, and it says three to two to one to zero is the only way you divest. We have a parking lot full of cars, we keep having cars pulling in on top of other cars, and we can’t even get cars out effectively right now,” he said. “New private sector organizations have no tech debt, and that’s why they’re so agile; the longer you’re around, the better you have to be at divestment. This is why we have horizons: You need to do trade offs.”

A third new framework the Navy is using is called “World-Class Alignment Metrics (WAMs).” That’s how the Navy decides which IT solutions might make sense as a candidate in one of its Horizon 3 entry points.

“We’ve got many folks who are perhaps proposing pilots this week. How do we know which of these good ideas is better? The way we are going to choose among them with all those opportunities is with WAMs that are outcome and mission-driven,” Koplin said. “It’s a consistent evaluation framework that lets us say we’re going to measure everything within certain swim lanes. We’re not going to compete a new laptop against a cyber situational awareness tool. But it gives us a way, within the portfolios and sub-portfolios, to say, ‘Oh, this is going to move the needle a lot,’ or ‘That’s going to maybe move the needle not so much.’”

Outside groups have also been urging the broader Defense Department to move toward portfolio-centric approaches. In its final report in January, the Atlantic Council’s commission on Defense innovation adoption specifically raised PEO Digital’s approach as an example of how organizations can make better technology decisions more quickly. And in March, the Congressional commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) reform also urged DoD and lawmakers to move from a program-centric management approach to portfolios of capabilities.

Fanelli said there are very clear signs that the portfolio approach is letting the Navy examine and adopt more new technologies than it ever has before. One data point: The Navy has made 10 times more Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards over the past 14 months than it had in the decade before that, he said.

And Congress has shown a good degree of interest in helping to solve the “valley of death” problem: getting those programs from those early stages to one of those more mature “horizons.”

As part of its version of the 2025 defense appropriations bill the House Appropriations Committee approved last week, the lawmakers advanced language that would significantly increase the funding for a broader DoD program called Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT). Under APFIT, DoD would have $400 million dollars available to help companies bridge the valley next year, up from just $100 million in 2022, when it was first created.

“The funding is compounding right now, because they want technologies to transition to programs of record, and you have to have a service and PEOs signing off on these things. We jumped on it,” Fanelli said.

The post How portfolio management is helping the Navy divest old tech, invest in new first appeared on Federal News Network.

An information technology team at the IRS has won recognition for a system that lets taxpayers submit correspondence online. More than a quarter million pieces of mail have already been avoided and officials expect a rate of 125 million pieces of digital mail a year. For their work and its impact on tax-processing efficiency, they’re finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin visited with project director Wanda Brown, who spoke on behalf of the team.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And we should acknowledge team members Darnita Trower and Gerald Johnson were cohorts with you in this particular project. It sounds like you took a capability that was existing already for internal IRS use and kind of turned it outward. Tell us more about what you did.

Wanda Brown Sure. We started off with ten notices that were directed to the taxpayer, and we were able to put a link on that notice and provide the taxpayer the capability to access that link and be able to send an uploaded version of their documentation directly to the IRS. Basically had the opportunity to take that capability and scale it. The IRS sends out about 3600 different notices and letters to the taxpayers. We were able to provide that capability through a link on the IRS.gov for a taxpayer to respond to any notice or letter that they receive from the IRS directly through uploading their documents.

Tom Temin Now that uploading was originally devised during the pandemic for employees.

Wanda Brown Yes, absolutely. We were able to receive correspondence from our employees during the pandemic. They were able to directly upload, and we took that capability and we expanded upon that significantly for the taxpayers use.

Tom Temin Now the taxpayer then gets a notice one of 3600 types of notices. I’m surprised it’s only 3600. And if their response is like a letter back to the IRS, then they presumably have to create that in a way that can be uploaded. What about the people that have to handwrite something? Can they scan it, or how does that work?

Wanda Brown They can handwrite it and they can scan it. They can take a picture of it and then upload it to the IRS.

Tom Temin They can use their phone actually, and take a picture of it.

Wanda Brown Absolutely.

Tom Temin Wow. And what was involved in expanding the upload and the server and the acceptance storage and all of this when you expanded from IRS employees, which is not a small number, about 10,000 people, I think to millions of potential taxpayers here.

Wanda Brown We were able to take advantage of the cloud technology, to be able to take advantage so that we would have the ability for the taxpayers to upload that image. We have a capability, and we were able to leverage it.

Tom Temin And a given taxpayer, is there a case file, let’s say, or a folder for each taxpayer such that somehow with a link that went to that taxpayer and whatever they upload is tied to their name or their Social Security number or something like that? How do you keep it all organized?

Wanda Brown We basically have the capability for the correspondence for that particular notice or letter to be uploaded, and it is housed in a, I’m going to call it buckets. It’s housed in a group of buckets. And we’re able to access that correspondence directly from the taxpayer.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Wanda Brown. She is the project director for digital services and digitalization in the Wage and Investment Division of the Internal Revenue Service. I think I got that all right. And what about employees who would normally get piles of mail? And as we know, mail was a problem. Physical mail, postal mail for the IRS when people weren’t in the office. There must have been some retraining for people to read digital uploaded versions versus splitting open mail and unfolding it.

Wanda Brown Absolutely. We have a very easy to use user interface, and they’re able to get into the tool. And I’m going to characterize it in buckets. And they’re able to get into their particular set of notices that they’re looking for they’ve been assigned to work. They’re able to get into it. They’re able to identify the actual correspondence that they’re looking for and be able to use digital image.

Tom Temin And do the buckets have identifiers such that suppose someone says, okay, well check on this later. And another operator or another IRS person can open that bucket and see what’s happening.

Wanda Brown Absolutely. And once an operator has access to the particular set of correspondence, they can identify it and mark it as archived. That they’re using it, that they’ve already processed it. And that helps us with our inventory.

Tom Temin It seems like this would also enable more people to work more effectively at home or telework.

Wanda Brown It does provide that capability, because it is digital that they can access it from where they are working. So they can access it from the location where they have been assigned to work. And if that happens to be their home, they can do that as well.

Tom Temin Because in most federal situations, people are not allowed to take official correspondence and records to their homes. So when it’s not the piece of paper, then they’re okay accessing it in a digital format from the location of a PC.

Wanda Brown Absolutely. Being able to access that digitally allows some additional flexibility to accessing information.

Tom Temin All right. And give us some statistics. How extensively has this been used? I guess it was deployed in time for the most recent tax season.

Wanda Brown Yeah. So very recently we have had a milestone. We’ve had over a million submissions through the document upload tool that we hit that earlier this week. So that that’s a big milestone for us. We’re celebrating that. And we expect more word of mouth, more people being able to access and get the benefit from that tool.

Tom Temin And I guess I should have asked this in the beginning. When you send out a notice to a taxpayer, do you send it to them as paper, because email from the IRS could be suspect as to its authenticity?

Wanda Brown Right now, people still receive a physical paper notice from the IRS. Those that have an online account capability. We are working on the capability for them to receive notices and letters through their online account. But right now, for those that do not, they will receive a physical notice in the mail from the IRS.

Tom Temin So it would be wise then, for a given taxpayer to establish an account so that they know that notices coming through that account are genuine, almost like signing up for a doctor practices portal.

Wanda Brown Yeah, that capability for online account is out there. And we do have lots of taxpayers that take advantage of that. It is not mandatory, but it is definitely a feature that we have out there for our taxpayers.

Tom Temin And how does this help efficiency of tax processing.

Wanda Brown So how it helps with the efficiency of tax processing. If you think about, I’m going to speak just from the correspondence perspective, just being able to send that in digitally. We’ve already talked about how that allows our employees to access the data, digitally and then they’re able to process it. That is one of the things that we continue to focus on, so that when we get an end, we’re able to digitize that and digitalize it, that those are the things that we’re working on. We’re a little bit away from being able to send data downstream. That’s one of the goals. Our intent is for our taxpayers to be able to interface with the IRS, just like they do with any financial institution. And it’ll take us, we’ve got a roadmap to get there. It’s going to take us a while, but that is the goal.

Tom Temin And I would think this would help, like load balance among your workforce, because if you don’t have to deal with physical paper, that means you don’t have to be in the same zip code as the physical paper.

Wanda Brown It definitely provides additional flexibility on how we take in the work and how we process the work, and how we can shift the work. Definitely provide some additional flexibilities there. But I want to stress, there is some segment of our taxpayer community that prefer to send paper into the IRS, and that is okay. That is okay for them to do that. We are prepared to be able to receive their physical paper if they’re not able to use some of the digital services that will be putting out.

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• Eric Goldstein, executive assistant director for cybersecurity, CISA
• Justin Orcutt, security specialist, aerospace and commercial defense team, Microsoft
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• House support for the Technology Modernization Fund sinks lower, as it has been left out of the initial draft of the fiscal 2025 Financial Services and General Government spending bill. This means House lawmakers are essentially not even considering the Biden administration’s $200 million request. This comes after Senate lawmakers zeroed out funding and rescinded $100 million from the TMF in the 2024 appropriations bill. House Republicans didn't turn off the IT modernization spigot altogether. Lawmakers would give the U.S. Digital Service more authority to accept up to $30 million through the IT Oversight and Reform (ITOR) Fund for reimbursable services.
  (House Republicans ignore Biden administration's TMF request - House Documents)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs said it will not fire leaders who backed improper bonuses. VA Secretary Denis McDonough said a “series of massive mistakes” led to his department approving nearly $11 million in bonuses to career executives who weren’t eligible to receive them under the toxic exposure PACT Act. "You cannot read the statute and say that this was an acceptable use of that statute,” McDonough said. But McDonough also said he will not fire the Under Secretary for Health or the Under Secretary for Benefits. Those two officials pushed for these awards. The VA has recouped about 92% of the improper bonuses. But it isn’t canceling critical skills incentives that went to nearly 200 career executives in the field. McDonough said VA leaders outside DC followed procedures and justified the awards to retain VA medical center directors.
  (VA secretary admits ‘massive mistakes’ over improper executive bonuses, rejects calls for firings - Federal News Network)
• The Office of Personnel Management needs to make hiring authorities more effective, and address mission-critical skills gaps. Those are just a few of the top recommendations the Government Accountability Office has outlined for OPM. In total, there are 16 priority recommendations that remain open for OPM to address. OPM was able to implement one of GAO’s suggestions last year by adding some new cybersecurity protocols. But GAO added two new recommendations to the list for 2024. One is to identify ineligible recipients of federal health benefits. And the second is to do a better job managing software licenses.
  (Priority open recommendations: Office of Personnel Management - Government Accountability Office)
• House Republicans are advancing a $64 billion homeland security spending bill. The House Appropriations Committee’s 2025 bill would increase funding for immigration enforcement, while trimming the Biden administration’s request for cybersecurity and science spending. The homeland security subcommittee approved the bill yesterday along party lines. The legislation includes $2.9 billion for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is about $78 million less than the White House’s requested. It also allocates $745 million for DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, some $93 million below the Biden administration’s request. The bill is now slated to be considered before the full committee.
  (Homeland security subcommittee bill summary - House Appropriations Committee )
• The House defense appropriations bill is out and it limits or blocks funding in several areas. The spending bill prohibits funding for DoD Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices and cuts $53 million for the department's DEI initiatives. The $833 billion measure prohibits paid leave and travel-related expenses to obtain an abortion or abortion-related services. And the spending bill also cuts $621 million for climate-change initiatives and prohibits funding for President Joe Biden’s climate-change executive orders and regulations. The House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee is set to mark up the bill today.
  (Defense spending bill blocks funding for DEI, abortion policies - House Appropriations Committee)
• A federal organization is making another pitch to repeal two long-standing provisions of Social Security. The National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) is heightening its calls to Congress to consider a bill that would remove the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO). NARFE said the two provisions unfairly reduce Social Security benefits for certain federal annuitants and other public sector workers. NARFE’s latest call for action comes ahead of a Senate committee hearing set for later this week to consider legislation that would revoke both WEP and GPO.
  (Letter on WEP and GPO - NARFE)
• The Veterans Affairs Department is calling on veterans to apply for health care and benefits if they suspect they were exposed to toxic substances during their military service. Many more veterans are eligible to do so under the toxic-exposure PACT Act. The VA is holding PACT Act events in all 50 states and Puerto Rico this summer to encourage more veterans to apply and get screened for toxic exposure. The VA approved more than a million PACT Act claims for benefits so far. And more than 400,000 veterans have enrolled in VA health care thanks to the PACT Act.
  (VA to host PACT Act events in all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico this summer to encourage Veterans and survivors to apply for health care and benefits - Department of Veterans Affairs)
• When it comes to cybersecurity regulations, the White House wants to make sure agencies are singing from the same hymn sheet. The Office of the National Cyber Director is launching a regulatory harmonization pilot program. The effort will examine how to use reciprocity in the critical infrastructure subsector. The White House is launching the pilot after industry groups urged the cyber director’s office to harmonize a growing patchwork of cyber requirements across government. But the office said it will need Congress’s help to get all agencies onboard.
  (We need to harmonize cybersecurity regulations - White House Office of the National Cyber Director )
• The Army is expanding its financial support for military spouses when they relocate. Spouses can now receive up to $1,000 for business expenses and an additional $1,000 for relicensing fees. Relicensing costs that are eligible for reimbursement include: exam fees, continuing education, certifications, business licenses, permits and registrations. Business-related expenses eligible for reimbursement include: equipment relocation, new technology purchases, IT services and inspection fees. Details on how to apply for reimbursement are available on the Military OneSource portal.
  (Army expands financial support for military spouses - DoD)

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