Using Modern Technology to Validate Tax Returns at IRS

For millions of Americans, the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) offers life-changing access to health insurance. For the Federal Government, it has required coordination across dozens of federal agencies.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was tasked with making the economics of the ACA work.

Booz Allen’s technology experts partnered with six business divisions across the IRS—and worked with nearly every vendor at the agency—to build a powerful validation tool, the ACA Verification System (AVS). In its first year, the system successfully processed more than 150 million tax returns, all without a hitch.

The IRS needed a system that could verify ACA data on tax returns, but still get taxpayers their refunds on time. While processing millions of returns, the IRS needed to confirm all taxpayers had insurance to reconcile subsidy payments for those who received insurance policies through the federal and state health insurance exchanges.

To meet verification requirements, the IRS stood up a new Implementation Program Office and IT Program Management Organization to implement the changes required and build modernized systems.

Booz Allen’s experts built the AVS on a modernized Java/J2EE platform. This bridged the gap between legacy and modern systems to execute ACA business rules.

Over a series of delivery sprints, our developers prototyped the mainframe/modernized platform integration while implementing progressively elaborate ACA validation requirements. Rapid prototyping helped us quickly demonstrate legislative requirements and get buy-in from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and IRS.

Our team transformed ACA validations by caching more than 40 gigabytes of data, reducing the database roundtrips and increasing scalability and performance. Agile best practices, including daily scrums, pseudo code, product backlogs, and others, were implemented.

We also achieved a moment of harmony, developing a security framework and requirements set adopted by all participating federal agencies to govern the exchanges.