IRS Will Buy In Electronic System To Fulfil Information Requests

Tax-News.com, New York

08 January 2003

In response to enormous demand for information under the United States Freedom of Information Act, the Internal Revenue Service is resorting to a privately supplied system which is in use in a number of other federal agencies.

The software, known as VeFOIA, was developed by Vredenburg, a Reston, Virginia-based document and record management company, and is widely used throughout government by agencies that handle a large volume of FOIA requests, including the FBI, the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration.

The IRS says it will use VeFIOA to turn its overloaded paper-based Freedom of Information Act request system into an electronic one within the coming year. Larry Den, Vredenburg's senior vice president for information technology, said this week that the software would fully automate the FOIA response process at the IRS, which receives as many as 70,000 requests a year.

The multiyear contract for VeFOIA was awarded under the Treasury Information Processing Support Services 2 contract last year. Vredenburg is a subcontractor with Science Applications International Corp. on the project, according to Den. The IRS has handled all FOIA requests by paper, sometimes taking years to respond to a citizen's request for information, Den said. But Congress has mandated annual government reporting on how long it takes to get a response to an FOIA request and ordered a time limit for acting on requests.

Vredenburg will build a prototype this year that will allow the IRS to turn paper-based requests into electronic files. Each request will get catalogued in a database, and an IRS employee responding to the request will put available documents online or in the system for anyone to retrieve.

"The target of the process is to shorten the cycle time, to make the process less expensive and to more effectively utilize the people they have," said Dyson Richards, Vredenburg's director of IT sales and marketing.

The Electronic Freedom of Information Act has proved to be a bonanza for systems suppliers. In 1999 alone, the number of requests for documents and other information more than doubled for the top 25 federal agencies, according to the General Accounting Office. The volume of demand for information is pushing federal agencies to rely increasingly on automation. About a third of the major agencies surveyed reported using electronic systems to automate their processing of E-FOIA requests, GAO said.

Electronic equipment and software is being used to convert paper documents to electronic form, to "redact" or remove sensitive information from documents before making them public, to route requests for information to the correct offices and to operate electronic reading rooms. Vredenburg's E-FOIA software suite can handle information requests from their origin online to the delivery of the requested documents and the entry of E-FOIA statistics in the annual report to the Justice Department.

The system also provides "scoping," or the ability to generate questions that narrow the scope of the search for information — and hence the work required — to fill an E-FOIA request. The VeFOIA system retains copies of documents that have been redacted and released to fill earlier requests. In addition to avoiding the work of redacting a document more than once, retaining redacted copies can prevent "the mosaic effect," Den said. That occurs when agencies redact documents multiple times, differently each time. Comparing the different versions often reveals information intended to be kept secret.

The Vredenburg system also automatically sends copies of frequently requested documents to agency electronic reading rooms, where they are available to the public, as required by E-FOIA. That can be a benefit for the public and for agencies. Posting information in electronic reading rooms makes it easy for the public to find. For agencies, "the more you put in the reading room, the fewer requests you get" and have to process, Den said.

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