The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said last month it established a new program called Pilot IRS that will look to investigate and acquire emerging technologies that will help the agency better serve taxpayers. The new program will evaluate and select emerging tech over a five-year period, with a $7 million cap on each project proposed.
The agency said it hopes to find more innovative approaches for implementing emerging technologies to the benefit of the government, and not be capped by the quickest and cheapest methods.
“This is not simply a question on ‘how quickly can we buy it’, but also a ‘how do we test it and decide whether or not to fund it for deployment,’” the IRS wrote in a program notice.
The goals of the program are to “promote innovative responses to IRS challenges; broadly communicate challenges and technologies that interest the IRS; and create a streamlined progression from concept, to prototype, testing and limited deployment.”
The projects selected by the IRS will be submitted through a proposal process and released under the Pilot IRS framework which sets out specific phases for funding decision points. The agency estimated that most projects will become longer duration and will require greater funding as they progress into new phases, and that the IRS will determine whether to provide additional funding at the end of each phase.
