IRS Awards Five $7.5M Contracts for Digitalization Tech

The Department of Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced five $7.5 million contract awards August 18 to help the agency scan and digitalize over a billion of the agency’s files.

As part of its Pilot IRS Solution Challenges, the agency awarded Brillient Corporation, Ripcord Inc., Government CIO LLC, Xerox Corporation, and Resultant/KSM Consulting each $7.5 million contracts in two phases over five years.

The five contractors will now be responsible for providing scanning-as-a-service for the IRS, helping it comply with Memorandum-19-21 and a rule by the National Archives and Records Administration that requires agencies to go paperless by December 2022.

The contractors will be responsible for completing four goals, according to the initial request for information (RFI):

1. “Receive, prepare, reproduce, sort, validate, store, return and transfer 300 and 400 dots per inch Portable Document Format (or comparable formats to be determined at a later date by the IRS, e.g., Extensible Markup Language (XML), etc.) digital copies of various sized paper records, pictures, and forms, potentially in very large volumes, with impeccable accuracy, high level of speed, and low levels of manual activity;
2. Meet all IRS Minimum Technical Digitization Specifications, Minimum Metadata Elements for IRS Records, and Minimum Quality Assurance, Control, and Review Standards;
3. Interface and be compliant with IRS systems, cybersecurity requirements, hardware, and software, etc. Interfaces and schemas included in potential solutions would need to be approved for use by the IRS Chief Information Officer; and
4. Validate and report on the accuracy of scanned digital copies against the original records (paper etc.). Transfer the digital copies to downstream processes such as data extraction that may be hosted within IRS systems and/or third-party extraction solutions through industry-standard interface mechanisms.”

The potential initial use case for the contract includes digitizing, or scanning and transmitting, over one billion pages, according to the RFI. The first phase of the contract will include testing and initial pilot deployment and have an award of $200,000 for 180 days of work. Phase two will consist of the deployment of the solutions that worked in the first phase and carry an award of $7.3 million over four and a half years.