Rules of the Road

HEADNOTE

MANAGING TECHNOLOGY

HEADNOTE

The IRS wants to modernize how it works along with the tools it uses.

Feeling celebratory

about recent get-tough moves by the Internal Revenue Service, Commissioner Mark W. Everson called a press conference in March 2005. He was there to tout how the IRS had netted more than $3 billion-now closer to $4 billion-in unpaid tax revenue, interest and fines by cracking down on an illegal tax shelter called Son of Boss.

"For those who didn't come forward, we know who they are," Everson warned tax dodgers who didn't take the IRS' settlement offer and avoid prosecution. "We are going after them."

At the same time, a group of IRS employees had just begun an eight-month effort to investigate a new way to update the agency's tax-processing technology.

The approach was a business rules engine, a technology for translating business logic into executable computer code.