IRS Has Loads of Legacy IT, Still Has No Firm Plans To Replace It

The IRS should reopen its Technology Retirement Office to effectively manage the retirement and replacement of legacy systems, according to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) audit. The Register reports: The report (PDF), from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), credits the IRS with fully implementing two out of four previous tech modernization recommendations, though argues the other two recommendations were ineffectively implemented. Those failures include the agency's decision in 2023 to scrap its own Technology Retirement Office, which stood up in 2021 'to strategically reduce the [IRS' IT] footprint.' Without that office, 'there is no enterprise-wide program to identify, prioritize, and execute the updating, replacing, or retiring of legacy systems' at the IRS, the inspector general declared, adding the unit should be reestablished or brought back in some similar form.

The closure of the retirement office, in the eyes of the TIGTA, is part of the IRS's failure to properly identify and plan for shutting down legacy systems and possibly replacing them with something modern. According to the audit report, the IRS identified 107 of its 334 legacy systems as up for retirement, yet only two of those 107 have specific decommissioning plans. The TIGTA would like to see clear plans for all of those identified systems, and had hoped the retirement office (or similar) would provide them. Then there's the second incomplete recommendation, which the IG said is the IRS' failure to properly apply its own definition of a legacy system to all of its tech. In its response to the IG report, the IRS said it had largely addressed the two incomplete recommendations, though not entirely as the Inspector General might want.

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