IRS to bring new accounting system online
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The tax agency plans to switch on its Integrated Financial System to handle core accounting, post debits and credits, and manage the budget.
The IRS plans to switch on its Integrated Financial System tomorrow to handle core accounting, post debits and credits, and manage the budget.
'IFS is being turned on in a rigorous and disciplined way. The majority of the functionality will be there when we turn the system on tomorrow,' said Robert Albicker, deputy associate commissioner of modernization for systems integration.
Other applications that will interface with IFS, such as travel, procurement and requisitions processing, have been tested and are in place. But most will not be running live tomorrow, he said. Instead, the IRS will gradually ramp up the interfaces to IFS, Albicker said.
For example, when an employee files a travel voucher, the voucher application will link back to IFS for automatic posting of the amount. The system will also create an audit trail of the originating organization and the financial codes that relate to the IRS budget.
'A lot of the focus of the initial implementation will be with the chief financial officer's organization to do their year-end close and their first monthly financial report cycle,' Albicker said at the GCN 2004 Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington.
In September, the IRS began assembling its fiscal 2004 report using the legacy Automated Financial System. After processing all the necessary transactions, the agency converted data and production information from the 2004 close and fiscal 2005 start into IFS so it could complete the end-of-year report and first month's statement, both due this month.
'We have very detailed charts that show day by day, hour by hour, what we've had to do from the middle of September until Nov. 10 in order to put the system into live production,' he said.
Beginning next month, the IRS will use the new system to produce W-2 and 1099 forms for employees and contractors to accompany 2004 tax returns. Contractor SAP America Inc. of Newtown Square, Pa., has recently completed the software changes for producing the 2004 W-2s and 1099s, Albicker said.
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