From paper to portal: How one city brought tax filings online
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Under an aggressive modernization strategy, Columbus, Ohio, has built a one-stop shop for filing income tax returns.
It’s tax season, and for most governments that means piles upon piles of paper. In Columbus, Ohio, once upon a time, it meant a “room that was paper,” according to Rasheda Hansard, administrator of the Columbus Division of Tax.
Today, that room smells of fresh paint as it’s being redecorated and repurposed. The tax returns of yesteryear have all been digitized and moved to the cloud, and in the place of paper returns filed in person or by mail is CRISP, the city’s one-stop portal for filing taxes, making payments and tracking refunds.
With the tax filing deadline a little over a month away, Columbus residents can for the second year in a row file online and for free through the Columbus Revenue Information Service Portal. Residents with questions can also communicate with a chatbot called OTUS, which has been designed to walk them through the filing process.
CRISP is part of a major modernization push by City Auditor Megan Kilgore, who took office in 2018. In an email, Kilgore said she has already implemented several modernization initiatives, including upgrading the division’s payroll and operations systems and embracing data analytics.
But there is little argument that the U.S. tax system is complicated, making the city’s effort to modernize how residents pay their income taxes a herculean undertaking. Indeed, the city relied on more than 200 legacy applications in its revenue operations, many of which were built on platforms and code that are no longer supported. It made for a “cumbersome” process all round, Hansard said.
Unifying all those applications under CRISP was a challenge, said Robert Prince, the tax division’s chief technology officer. But the city signed a contract with Fast Enterprises to use its cloud-based tax administration software GenTax, and then set about transferring over all its processes into one unified and customizable platform.
“We want to be a 21st-century income tax organization,” he said, noting that the effort operated as an “agile project” with different rollouts at different stages.
The city is now focused on ensuring its new systems are stable and can cope with the expected influx of city tax returns, both for customers and for staff. Automating some processes and “eliminating keystrokes” is also high on the agenda, Prince said, in a bid to make employees’ jobs easier and more efficient.
Already, the portal has streamlined processes for city staff by moving everything to one place. It has also made filing taxes in Columbus a bit easier. And for the less tech savvy, there is still an option to file in-person at city hall if they want. City residents can’t file state and federal taxes through the portal, though.
Columbus is far from the only government agency modernizing its tax collection process. In recent years, the IRS has looked to move away from paper under an aggressive modernization strategy, bolstered by funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. The Treasury Department estimated last month that the legislation as enacted would increase revenue to the IRS by as much as $561 billion over the next decade because of the modernization and enhanced enforcement efforts.
The IRS is also piloting this tax season its free Direct File online service in 12 states, and has opened bidding for a $1.9 trillion blanket purchase agreement for enterprise IT and related professional support services.
In launching CRISP, Columbus wanted to make a complicated process a little less complicated. City leaders acknowledge the portal may not be possible for every city, given the different wrinkles in each state’s taxing system.
But if a government does tackle overhauling their tax filing system, Hansard said that key to a successful modernization rollout is communication. Part of those conversations are with staff who may be used to using one system and are now being asked to move to a newer system. Communicating with the public about these changes is crucial, too.
“There's always questions that have to be answered about whether or not it's wise to spend that kind of money to invest,” Hansard said. “[You must] always be prepared to explain, ‘Yes, we invest now because it will save us money.’ Our goal is to bring in more money later on because we have better information that we can use to make sure everybody is paying their fair share.”
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