Some information technology offices within the Internal Revenue Service have had difficulty in adjusting to an automated requirements management tool, says the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

In a report dated Sept. 30 not posted online until Nov. 25, TIGTA notes that all stakeholders of the tax agency's modernization effort known as Customer Account Data Engine 2 have had to use an IBM Rational software tool, RequisitePro, to create and manage requirements.

CADE 2 is a centerpiece of a now decades-long modernization effort by the IRS to replace the magnetic tape file storage system at the heart of its tax processing systems. The IRS says it will in January 2012 implement "Transition State 1" of CADE 2, in which a relational database should store all individual taxpayer account information and batch processing of magnetic tape taxpayer information should go from a weekly to daily cycle.    

The CADE 2 program office has directed IRS offices with a stake in the project to use ReqPro so that requirements might be more easily tracked, but doing so has proved a challenge to those more accustomed to managing requirements through other automated tools or Excel spreadsheets.

The IRS cybersecurity organization, for example, extracted requirements from ReqPro into an Excel spreadsheet, then re-uploaded a new set of requirements after making changes internally, TIGTA auditors say.

"Use of this method created a situation where security requirements were very unstable," the report says, adding that 1,137 security requirement discrepancies were created as a result. In addition, some security requirements listed as approved in ReqPro resurfaced after the re-upload was not approved, auditors say.

The risk of incomplete, missing or invalid requirements could delay the scheduled January 2012 system deployment, auditors warn.

In the official IRS response to the audit, IRS Chief Technology Officer Terry Milholland says IRS users can now only export requirements from ReqPro for reporting purposes only.

For more:
- download the report, TIGTA-2011-20-127 (.pdf)

Related Articles:
IRS faces challenges in relational database, says GAO 
IRS standing up IT risk management office 
IRS misses cost-saving opportunity to renegotiate mainframe contracts, says IG