The first Internal Revenue Service information technology organization to implement the Information Technology Infrastructure Library isn't proactive in problem management, as called for by ITIL, says the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration in an Aug. 16 report.

ITIL is an IT management framework developed by the U.K. government in the 1980s; it defines IT management according to processes but isn't highly prescriptive on methodologies. The U.S. government's most high-profile ITIL acolyte likely is the Navy, which adopted it for its massive NMCI land-based network operation and plans on continuing its use with NMCI's successor, NGEN.  

In September 2010, the IRS Chief Technology Officer Terry Millholland outlined a goal to have the entire IRS function implement ITIL over the next several years. The IRS support organization tasked with ensuring that  normal operations are maintained for mainframes and servers used to receive and process tax returns has already adopted the event management, incident management and problem management service operations processes.

ITIL says problem management should be both a reactive and a proactive process--i.e., solve problem tickets, but also look for potential problems before they become a ticket. But, the IRS is only doing the former, TIGTA says. Auditors say the IRS should review incident ticket data for common problems, since that might show areas of failure to resolve root problems and could help identify problems common to other places within the IRS IT infrastructure.

Millholland, in the tax agency's official response to the audit, said he agrees with the recommendation.

For more:
- download the audit, 2011-20-078 (.pdf)

Related Articles:
TIGTA: IRS.gov offers better service than telephone assistance
TIGTA: E-file saves the IRS money, but it could be saving more
TIGTA: Programming errors at IRS complicate tax processing