Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the status of the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS): (1) Corporate Files On-Line (CFOL) projects, intended to provide IRS immediate access to tax information; and (2) telecommunications plans.
GAO found that: (1) IRS began CFOL in December 1987 as a short-term initiative to reduce the number of erroneous and unreportable tax account transactions and to allow employees to research the master file to identify taxpayers or obtain tax return information; (2) IRS has implemented four systems within its On-Line Entity Index File Project, including the Integrated Data Retrieval System, but was still developing most of the remaining CFOL projects and their supporting systems and expected them to be operational by spring 1993; (3) IRS decided not to implement a second version of CFOL that used a separately purchased database management system after GAO questioned its usefulness; and (4) in October 1990, IRS reorganized its telecommunications division to facilitate coordinated telecommunications planning and implementation and to assign telecommunications a higher priority in Tax System Modernization program planning.
