Interview With IRS Deputy Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya: IRS and TEI working group coordinates efforts to optimize IRS technology.

• Author: Kaufman, Brian
• Position: Tax Executives Institute

To keep current on tax issues, TEI members always like to hear directly from top Internal Revenue Service officials. So, we were thrilled when Kaschit Pandya, deputy chief information officer at the IRS, accepted our invitation to be interviewed by Brian Kaufman, vice president and tax counsel at Capital One Financial Corporation, at the May 2022 Tax Technology Seminar in San Francisco. Here's an edited transcript of their conversation.

Brian Kaufman: Kaschit Pandya has been with the IRS for nine years and has a passion for technology. He and his team have done tremendous things at the IRS in the last few years, especially during the pandemic. We're really excited to have him here today. This is the first time we've had an IRS speaker at this conference, and Kaschit was gracious enough to travel from Washington, D.C., to join us. It's funny--as we sat through the presentations this morning, I couldn't help but think that the IRS is actually on a very similar journey to what we as taxpayers are. They are dealing with the same type of technology challenges, some even much older and harder to solve, and they're working along the same track. So, with that, TEI has partnered with Kaschit and his leadership team to form a technology working group that we're very excited about [and] which we started last year. That's how we've built a relationship with him and some other IRS tech leaders, with the goal of working together as part of a coordinated effort on technology, where we as taxpayers can help them understand where there are roadblocks and opportunities for improvement and where he and his team can help us. It's a really collaborative process, and we've just gotten started over the last year or so during the pandemic. We're excited to expand and get more of you involved and interacting with the IRS. As technology improves, I foresee lots of opportunities for interaction. With that, I am going to turn it over to Kaschit, just to give some background on his role and how the IRS is working through modernization.

Kaschit Pandya: Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a fun session this morning, just introducing myself as the IRS. In addition to that, I am now interrupting your lunch. So, you know, that makes me doubly popular. My name is Kaschit Pandya. I'm the deputy chief information officer of the IRS, and I've been with the agency for nine years. I came from the private world. I worked at various large organizations--national, international--all in information technology, and it's been quite a journey for us at the IRS over the last many years. It's been an incredible ride for me, experiencing the government side after having worked in private industry for so long.

As Brian mentioned, we've been working collaboratively over the last year and a half or so, right around when the pandemic started, and the intent of the conversations that we've had--and I really do wish that, after this conversation today, many more of you are able to join those conversations. At the IRS, certainly as a tax revenue agency, we are heavily focused on how, from a technology perspective, we can improve the experience of everyone. While a lot of the focus tends to be on the individual side--because, again, the individual side is larger than the corporate side--my perspective as a chief information officer is to determine how technology can best enhance and improve the experience across the board, individually and on the corporate side.

The IRS has taken on the modernization efforts starting in 2019. We initiated a multiphase modernization effort. We called it "Mod Plan 1.0." Naturally, right? It's a tech term, and we love our tech terms. Mod Plan 1.0 was broken up into two phases, three years each--six years total--and the focus of it was across four different pillars: taxpayer experience, core tax services, [and] two pillars focused on IRS operations and cybersecurity. The IRS operations and cybersecurity are inwardly focused, while the taxpayer experience and the core taxpayer services are outwardly focused. We want to make sure that we are able to provide the best customer service and customer experience to all of you--corporate, individual, regardless. But we often realized we were not looking inwardly enough from a modernization perspective. We want to make sure, of course, that every service that we can modernize from a taxpayer experience perspective is available and accessible to all of you, but we also knew that we had to look inwards to improve our operations. And that's why the pillars are broken up into outside and internal facing. Cybersecurity oversees all of that, because security is of paramount importance to us. But modernization is focused on the outside as much as it is on the inside. So, Brian and I, we're going to chat a bit more about what we're going to do in the modernization space, externally facing and internally facing, but really focused on the full spectrum, outside and in.

Kaufman: I think a lot of times you don't hear about some of the really good work done in the corporate space. For example, during the pandemic, Kaschit and his partners and I were able to push forward first an upgrade to government Zoom. And now it's to the point where I think almost every forward-facing agent in the IRS has access to Microsoft Teams, [allowing them] to go to a video environment, which is a huge benefit, particularly now when we're in an environment where we're just starting to get back together in person. A couple other things, the IRS rolled out a secure messaging site to allow the transfer of large documents. That is something our TEI group had encouraged, and Kaschit and his team worked really quickly to do that, as well as to make accessible to their teams some of the virtual reading room technology out there and to white-list a variety of programs to help exchange information, particularly in transfer pricing and R&E audits. And that's just the start. I wanted to ask you, What are some of the challenges? Obviously, the taxpayers have a different type of budgeting approval process, particularly those who work in agile [practices] and can be a lot more flexible with spending, with hiring, with developing and failing and then pivoting, which obviously is much harder...