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IRS
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is a Federal Bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury, with the responsibility to administer and enforce the Internal Revenue code and laws on behalf of the United States.
Challenge
FATCA is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which is a legislatively mandated act to track U.S. citizen financial accounts residing abroad. Paper-based forms sent by postal mail with dual media sources plus varying national reporting laws and standards required significant amounts of data cleansing. As a result, the IRS needed to optimize and digitize the way FATCA participants registered, completed, and sent forms to remain compliant. OneSpring was engaged over a four year period to help design a modernized FATCA system.
Solution
The solution required numerous teams to plan and implement the necessary integrated technical systems to exchange enhanced tax data and provide reporting capabilities for compliance analysis. OneSpring was selected as the lead requirements and design vendor tasked with supporting the business unit teams within the IRS. Our goal was to clarify, document, and communicate the requirements for this robust and complex multi-project, multi-release iterative project.
To support the IRS with eliciting, clarifying, and capturing the functional business requirements across the various FATCA projects, OneSpring established a team of eight innovative business analysts, user experience designers, and facilitators who worked closely with the business Product Owner, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and development teams for each project by performing ongoing facilitated workshops called Joint Application Modeling (JAM) sessions. These sessions utilize various techniques, including Agile best practices, Project Management, Human-Centered Design (HCD), visualization and rapid prototyping, to clearly and concisely communicate the business goals, gain consensus, and align them with the technical teams.
Results
The team designed an interactive prototype of the user interactions and interfaces during each Sprint. The screens were linked together to create a single model of the system which was shared with the development team and business stakeholders. Functional requirements, user stories, business rules, and roles were also documented to provide further detail to the prototype for clarity and development purposes. OneSpring documented and managed all functional and system requirements for FATCA and worked closely and collaboratively over four years to support the initiative to ensure clarity with project development teams assigned to build each iteration of the system. FATCA was successfully launched and is in use today.
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