♪♪ Man: Taxpayer First Act. How we got here.

The world of taxpayers and stakeholders has changed, as have their expectations.

Technology has changed, and so has our workforce.

Our taxpayer base is more diverse than it was 20 years ago, and so are IRS partners and external stakeholders.

Previous strategies, improvements, and legislation have brought us to this point.

The Taxpayer First Act was introduced last July by Congress and gives us an opportunity to shape our future.

It's an opportunity to fundamentally change the way we do business by shifting to a more taxpayer-centered model.

There are 44 total provisions.

Though the Taxpayer First Act owns the development of recommendations for three of them -- customer service strategy, modernization of IRS organizational structure, and comprehensive training strategy -- the Taxpayer First Act gives the IRS an incredible opportunity to make significant improvements for taxpayers and employees alike in the way that our organization serves taxpayers through enhanced agency collaboration, remodeled training, expanded digital services, among many other initiatives.

The Taxpayer First Act will be delivering these strategies in a comprehensive report to Congress for their review in December 2020.

TFA includes a provision that mandates the IRS to develop and implement a multi-year strategic plan for the agency's information technology needs.

The IT strategic plan will help the IRS maintain a unified vision, goals, and objectives.

It will align with the agency's strategic plan and our approach to modernize the taxpayer experience, employee training, and our organizational structure.

These strategies will ensure we stay on the path to modernization.

The IT strategic plan will align with the TFA's future direction of the IRS and technology needed to improve the taxpayer experience.

The plan will be different from the integrated modernization business plan released in April 2019.

While the modernization plan included tactical deliverables planned over the next six years, the IT strategic plan will focus on the IRS as a whole and its information technology workforce.

Our mission statement is intended to instill pride and confidence in our nation's tax system by developing a strategy for continuously improving the taxpayer experience and an organizational structure that enables seamless taxpayer interactions.

Our vision is to work collaboratively, while the Taxpayer First Act will re-imagine our organization to enable a service-wide focus on providing a high-quality taxpayer experience for all.

As we pursue our mission and vision through our guiding principles, our focus will be coordination and integration, listen, learn, and then design, build an excitement through regular transparent communications, embrace accountability through results.

The TFA Office is responsible for implementing certain Taxpayer First Act provisions while coordinating service-wide implementation efforts for the remaining provisions.

We want to walk you through TFAO's high-level timeline, including our past accomplishments and next steps.

In fiscal year 2019, fourth quarter, we established the TFAO by selecting executive leaders with experience and passion for driving transformation in the IRS to lead the team and candidates from various spots and diverse professional backgrounds to support.

In fiscal year 2020 first quarter through fiscal year 2020 second quarter, we kicked off the stakeholder feedback phase, in which we collected feedback and ideas for improving customers' interactions with the IRS, employees' training procedures, and the current organizational structure so that we had a robust understanding of the IRS' challenges and ways to improve that would then inform the three TFA strategies.

Later in this presentation, we'll share more about the wide array of stakeholders we engaged with.

In fiscal year 2020 third quarter, we primarily focused on developing our recommendations for the strategies themselves, all the while continuing to maintain engagement with stakeholders and host outreach activities.

We're currently entering the fiscal year 2020 fourth quarter, where we intend to share what we recommend with our stakeholders for additional feedback and input before finalization in the report to Congress.

Our original due date was fiscal year 2020 third quarter, July, however due to COVID-19 and the shift in priorities of the agency and all federal government, our new due date is December 2020.

Our next steps are to finalize our recommendations for the report and conduct several iterations of review ahead of submission to Congress in December 2020.

One of our guiding principles has been to listen, learn, then design.

IRS operates at an unparalleled level of scale by servicing and interacting with millions of Americans every year.

Given our organization's reach and complexity, we felt there was no other way to go about crafting these monumental strategies, except to start by listening to our various stakeholders before jumping into development.

Audiences/sources that helped us identify challenges and potential solutions include customer satisfaction surveys, taxpayer advocacy panel, online services surveys from taxpayers, tax practitioners' e-file parties, reporting agents, payroll industry, TFA forum from practitioners.