IRS Taps Five Companies for New Iteration of Digitization Program

The Internal Revenue Service has awarded five contracts under an experimental procurement vehicle in support of a multiple solution challenge to digitize paper files.

According to a request for proposals issued in July, the IRS wanted to use the Pilot IRS program for testing innovative solutions that can “receive, prepare, reproduce, sort, validate, store, return and transfer” digital copies of IRS documents and records. 

In its effort to develop solutions that support the scanning of paper documents and the extraction of machine-readable data, the IRS selected Government CIO, Resultant, Xerox, Brilliant Corporation and Ripcord, FCW reported.

Each of the selected companies received a contract valued at $7.5 million 

The Pilot IRS program was introduced in late 2018 with the goal of helping the agency identify solutions and technologies designed to achieve the organization’s goals. The program uses a three-phase approach to determine which contracts provide the best results. 

For its sixth iteration, the program focuses on scanning as a service, which is part of the IRS’ effort to reduce reliance on non-machine-readable documentation. 

A successful contract focused on SCaaS has a chance to help the agency meet its December 2022 deadline for the federal government to go paperless. 

The July RFP noted that the volume of IRS documents expected to be digitized is significant. 

The initial potential use case of the upcoming industry-developed solutions could have upwards of 1 billion pages, the tax agency said.