Direct File PWS 08062024.pdf

Performance Work Statement (PWS)

Inflation Reduction Act

“IRS Direct File Digital Services Support”

August 6, 2024

1.0 OBJECTIVE

IRS Direct File is a new service that provides taxpayers with the ability to file a tax return online directly with the IRS, for free. Direct File employs a “blended teams” model, where federal employees and contributors from multiple Contractor teams are combined into small, multidisciplinary sprint teams, working side by side to maintain Direct File and develop new functionality. The objective of this effort is to provide agile product design and delivery services on Direct File product teams in order to expand Direct File functionality and make it available to all qualifying taxpayers.

The Functional Areas (Section 4.0) describes skills that may be required.

2.0 INTRODUCTION

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 provided the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) significant funding to transform and modernize tax administration. In accordance with §10301(1)(B) of the IRA, in May 2023 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) delivered to Congress a report on a potential IRS-run free direct e-file system (Direct File)1. After reviewing the report, the U.S. Department of Treasury directed the IRS to pilot Direct File in filing season 2024 to gather data to further assess issues identified in the report before deciding whether to deploy a full-scale Direct File solution.

Direct File is a service that provides taxpayers the option to electronically file their federal tax return for free, directly with the IRS. Learning from IRS’s experiences with Economic Impact Payments and the Advance Child Tax Credit, Direct File is an interview-based service that is intended to work as well on a mobile phone as it does on a laptop, tablet, or desktop computer. It is currently available in English and Spanish and is designed to be accessible to taxpayers who have a variety of attitudes, aptitudes, abilities, and access needs.

After reviewing the results of the pilot2, IRS announced that it will make Direct File a permanent option for filing federal tax returns starting in the 2025 filing season.3

3.0 BACKGROUND

1 IRS. IRS Report to Congress: Inflation Reduction Act §10301(1)(B) IRS-run Direct e-File Tax Return System.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5788.pdf 2 IRS. IRS Direct File Pilot Program: Filing Season 2024 After Action Report. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5969.pdf 3 IRS. IRS makes Direct File a permanent option to file federal tax returns; expanded access for more taxpayers planned for the 2025 filing season. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-makes-direct-file-a-permanent-option-to-file-federal-tax-returns-expanded-access-for-more-taxpayers-planned-for-the-2025-filing-season

The IRS has a significant impact on the lives of the American people, and is responsible for collecting approximately 97% of the revenue to support the operations of the U.S.

government.4 The amount of time the American people spend recordkeeping, gathering tax materials, filling out their taxes, and other tax-related activities makes up approximately 63% of all Federal paperwork burden annually.5 On average, including all associated forms and schedules for non-business income, individual taxpayers spend approximately 9 hours and $150 preparing their taxes each year.6

Taxpayer expectations, opinions, and perceptions of the IRS are shaped by these experiences of filing tax returns. Tax returns can be prepared and submitted in many ways, including via paper through the mail; electronically through IRS’s Free File or Free File Fillable Forms; through a free tax return preparation site, such as IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and the Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) programs; through commercial do-it-yourself software, both paid and free; and with support from professional tax preparers.

The agency’s vision for Direct File revolves around three themes:

• Get it right from the start. Direct File represents a commitment to helping every taxpayer file an accurate return and get the tax benefits to which they are entitled. Taxpayers should not have to worry about having made a mistake or miss out on a valuable credit. Direct File is one potential mechanism for increasing the fairness of our tax system.

• Taxes are the product. Direct File seeks to improve the experience of taxes themselves. It is an opportunity to increase tax fluency via transparent, clear explanations while reducing the burden of tax filing. In concert with rejuvenated customer support, increased outreach and assistance options, and a focus on simplifying notices and IRS.gov content, the IRS has more levers than ever to make taxes accessible to everyone.

• One option among many. While Direct File ensures the availability of an always free filing option, it is essential that Americans have the choice to file however suits them, even if that’s on paper. Lessons learned and technology developed

4 IRS. “Final Monthly Treasury Statement for Fiscal Year 2023 through September 30, 2023, and other Periods.” Page 38.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-reports/mts/MonthlyTreasuryStatement_202309.pdf 5 IRS. Research, Applied Analytics & Statistics. Tax Compliance Burden Report 2023. Page 1. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5743.pdf 6 IRS. Tax Year 2023 Instructions for forms 1040 (and 1040-SR). Page 108. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf#page=108. These cost estimates do not consider post-filing interactions with the IRS.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-reports/mts/MonthlyTreasuryStatement_202309.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5743.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5743.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf#page=108 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf#page=108 by Direct File can be shared across the IRS and the tax filing ecosystem to make everyone’s experience of taxes better, no matter how they file.

The IRS Direct File government team includes technologists, service designers, data scientists, product designers, content strategists, and other relevant digital skillsets.

These in-house technologists have formed blended teams with contractors (hereinafter referred to as Product Teams). Each team included multiple disciplines, with no separation between design and engineering, and they were empowered to iteratively find the best solution to high-level requirements, to develop new features in response to feedback from taxpayers, and to prioritize a backlog of potential work.

There are five practices that the Product Teams will employ:

1. Share responsibility for digital. Cross-functional teams that include both technology experts and subject matter experts work collaboratively to identify, prioritize, build, and test components of new services.

2. Cultivate internal digital talent. Teams are led by internal engineering, design, and product experts who drive product and technical decisions.

3. Ship every day. The team releases changes every day. When stakeholders check out the in-progress work, they see the latest and greatest.

4. Build with taxpayers, not for taxpayers. Product design is motivated by the perspectives and needs of real taxpayers, who participate throughout its development, from before a line of code is written through to release.

5. Work in the open. Products are built as Open Source Software from day one, meaning that its code is available for anyone to inspect and reuse. This is one of a set of transparent practices that build trust and excitement.

The primary purpose of a service contract in this blended team model is for the Contractor(s) to provide IT digital service design, research, content, engineering, development, security, and operations expertise to supplement/support new and existing government teams where needed. Teams will be comprised of Government and Contractor designers and technologists working in a collaborative manner within sprint teams. The Government Product Owners and Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) will have final decision-making authority.

Recommended digital service labor categories may include the following (but not limited to):

• Product Manager

• Project or Delivery Manager

• Back-end Engineer, Senior

• Front-end Engineer, Senior

• DevOps Engineer, Senior

• Security Expert, Senior

• Site Reliability Engineer

• UX Writer, Senior

• Content Designer, Senior

• Content Specialist, Senior

• Language Access Specialist (Spanish)

• User Experience Researcher, Senior (including with native Spanish skills)

• UX Designer, Senior

• Service Designer, Senior

• Accessibility Expert, Senior

• Data Scientist

• Data Analytics, Senior

• Data Analytics Engineer, Senior

• Test Automation Engineer

• Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer

• Quality Assurance Test Analyst

Staffing for these areas can be done with people who specialize in an area or are generalists across multiple areas or a combination of specialists and generalists. Core competencies for all the roles include problem solving, proactive communication, and the ability to make sense of complex tax laws and then translate them into user-friendly designs and content.

Some of these roles may need multiple people. Although teams aim to maintain the same structure, certain roles may be in higher demand at different points in the product life cycle. The Government recommends staffing individuals full-time on the project unless required for strategically reducing time during fluctuations in project needs.

4.0 FUNCTIONAL AREAS

The Product Teams require Contractors with expertise in several skill areas.

1. Product Management

2. User Research

3. UX Writing and Content Design

4. UX Design

5. Service Design

6. Translation and Language Access

7. Software Engineering and Development

8. Operations and Monitoring

9. Security and Compliance

10. Data and Metrics

11. Quality Assurance

4.1 PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Direct File employs a truly agile approach, where Product Teams are empowered to design and prioritize functionality that addresses goals established by IRS leadership, responding to user research, data, and other insights to develop and maintain a high-quality product that addresses taxpayer needs.

The Product Teams shall:

• Conduct discovery activities on existing products as well as internal and external business process flows and functions. Work closely with IRS customers to understand their needs and how those needs map to IRS capabilities. Collect available data, taxpayer feedback, and stakeholder feedback and synthesize these insights into reports or other resources.

• Maintain a product roadmap that includes a comprehensive list of the Direct File functionality that needs to be built or updated and prioritization of these based on discovery that has happened, as well as product success metrics.

• Manage backlog of tasks based on taxpayer needs derived from user research, including a description of the taxpayer need being addressed, references to specific artifacts describing the taxpayer need, a proposed approach to meet the taxpayer need, and an estimate of the relative complexity of the approach.

• Create sprint plans based on a prioritized backlog, define acceptance criteria that are accepted by the Product Owner prior to the sprint commencing. Provide a sprint demo and review to confirm all functionality developed in the iteration and demonstrates all acceptance criteria.

• Participate in stakeholder meetings, some of which may be in-person at Government facilities, to plan building and integrating the services and change management activities including but not limited to managing agendas, minutes, action items, and collaboration tool management meetings.

• Develop, maintain, and communicate meaningful product metrics that are directly linked to the taxpayers need or problem the product is intended to address. This task includes identifying and measuring baseline metrics for comparison.

• Establish and maintain integrated, cross-functional, and cross-organizational (e.g., having Contractor and Government members) teams to enhance communication, share lessons learned, and facilitate rapid identification and mitigation of dependencies between various functional entities.

• Comprehensively document the Direct File key specifications, dependencies, data elements, design and architecture decisions, integrations, and any other salient characteristics that would be useful to future teams supporting the Direct File.

• Design and build products that are accessible to the widest range of taxpayers and devices; all products must be Section 508-compliant. It must go beyond simple accessibility compliance (e.g., it meets the requirements of Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act) and also be easy for taxpayers who use assistive technology to use.

4.2 USER RESEARCH

The Direct File guiding principles include the value: “Design with taxpayers, not for taxpayers,” and the Product Teams center the taxpayer in all user experience work.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on research strategy and ensure a quality experience that enables taxpayers to accurately and confidently file their taxes.

• Collaborate closely with other members of the team and stakeholders to develop research studies and to ensure research aligns with their learning goals and the resulting insights are action oriented. Help partners to understand what was learned and how to turn those insights into action in order to iteratively improve the quality of the product.

• Work with community organizations and recruiters to find diverse taxpayers to participate in user research.

• Conduct frequent evaluative user research to test assumptions and validate design and content decisions. May include usability testing, concept testing, content-focused testing, observations and contextual inquiry, card sorting, tree testing, unmoderated testing, etc.

• Contribute to efforts to collect taxpayer feedback and quantitative data, analytics, and other metrics aimed at evaluating the taxpayer experience.

• Practice inclusive and trauma-informed research practices. Conduct research with participants who represent a wide range of taxpayers with different abilities and aptitudes, including people who use assistive technology.

• For each study, create and maintain lean documentation. Documentation should include a research plan (research questions, hypotheses, methodology, recruiting needs), moderation guide, and a summary of the synthesis and next steps.

4.3 UX WRITING AND CONTENT DESIGN

Content is a major part of the design of Direct File, typically using a content-first approach. Content work includes presenting questions to taxpayers to collect their information and determine their eligibility, providing details to help novice taxpayers understand complex tax topics, and content to help them navigate the process, use features, and understand how to recover from errors.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on content strategy and ensure a quality experience that enables taxpayers to accurately and confidently file their taxes.

• Collaborate closely with other members of the team and stakeholders to create designs that align with product goals and work especially closely with other designers, content specialists, and researchers to solve design challenges.

• Actively participate in discovery and desk research (including reading IRS publications and guidance) to understand complex tax topics.

• Write and design content for all aspects of Direct File. Includes labeling, complex tax related question and answer screens, short help guidance, long-form guidance, error messages, navigational elements, customer support knowledge base, search engine optimization.

• Lead effort to ensure content is highly accessible, inclusive, and user-friendly.

Use plain language, language access, and inclusive language best practices that will ensure taxpayers can accurately and confidently file their taxes. Have awareness of how language choices impact wide diversity of taxpayers and impact on translation into other languages.

• Collaborate closely with tax subject matter experts to turn complex tax language into user-friendly language.

• Provide editorial support across entire product and services to ensure consistency and alignment with content style guide.

• Lead development of content strategy, workflows, governance, and approval processes.

• Take a human-centered approach by participating in research studies (e.g., guiding researchers, observing, taking notes, and participating in synthesis and next steps).

• Create documentation related to important decisions, maintain the content style guide, and details related to approval process.

4.4 UX DESIGN

Direct File design aims to be human-centered, simple, and user-friendly. Design work is primarily focused on interaction design and content design for the Direct File landing page, eligibility checker, and tax filing application.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on design strategy and ensure a quality experience that enables taxpayers to file their taxes accurately and confidently.

• Collaborate closely with other members of the team and stakeholders to create designs that align with product goals and work especially closely with other designers, content specialists, and researchers to solve design challenges.

• Design interactive interfaces. May include wireframes, low- and high-fidelity designs, page layouts, content design, menus and navigation, information architecture, user flows, and interactive prototypes for usability testing.

• Create simple, user-friendly, inclusive, mobile-first, and highly accessible designs that align with the U.S. Web Design System.

• Actively participate in discovery and desk research (including reading tax code) to understand complex tax topics.

• Create and maintain documentation about decisions and pattern use. Contribute to the creation and management of a Direct File design system.

• Take a human-centered approach by participating in research studies (e.g., guiding researchers, observing, taking notes, and participating in synthesis and next steps).

• Occasionally contribute graphic or visual design to support outreach materials.

https://designsystem.digital.gov/

4.5 SERVICE DESIGN

Direct File is not simply a single product — it also includes customer support services and exists in the larger ecosystem of IRS. Service design aims to take a holistic view to ensure a quality experience regardless of where the taxpayer is in the process or what tool they’re currently interacting with.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on service design strategy and ensure a quality experience that enables taxpayers to accurately and confidently file their taxes.

• Collaborate closely with other members of the team and stakeholders to ensure a positive end-to-end experience filing taxes.

• Take a human-centered approach by participating in research studies (e.g., leading research or guiding researchers, observing, taking notes, and participating in synthesis and next steps).

• May design workflows, journey maps, process diagrams, service blueprints, or other design artifacts.

• Work closely with the customer support team trainers and content specialists to develop workflows, scripts, training materials, and knowledge base articles.

• Work closely with the customer support team to gain insights into taxpayer and customer support representation (CSR) needs and behaviors.

• Actively participate in discovery and desk research (including reading IRS publications and guidance) to understand complex tax topics.

• Act as a conduit between the customer support team and the product team to ensure that customer support is aware of product decisions that will impact them and that customer support interactions with taxpayers can inform product improvements.

4.6 TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE ACCESS

The Direct File first year pilot launched in both English and Spanish. The team is committed to continuing to deliver in both English and Spanish for the second year and ensuring the same quality experience for both English and Spanish speakers. As resourcing allows, Direct File may expand to include other languages in future years, which would require the same kinds of expertise as Spanish.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on translation, Spanish language, and language access strategy (e.g., workflows, translation tools, style guide) and ensure a quality experience that enables taxpayers to accurately and confidently file their taxes.

• Collaborate closely with other members of the team and stakeholders to ensure Direct File services are inclusive for taxpayers who speak or prefer interacting in Spanish.

• Maintain detailed knowledge of the Direct File user experience to enable the successful translation and quality assurance of highly dynamic content.

• Take a human-centered approach by conducting research studies in Spanish, in collaboration with other researchers and designers.

• Work closely with the IRS Translation Department to ensure translations are consistent and align with the style guide.

• Directly contribute to Spanish translations by drafting initial translations or suggesting edits.

• Manage and track workflows related to translation tasks.

• Actively participate in discovery and desk research (including reading tax code) to understand complex tax topics.

• Create and maintain documentation about decisions and Spanish language style guide.

4.7 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND DEVELOPMENT

Direct File engineering and development is not siloed from other parts of Product Teams and are expected to collaborate with other disciplines to find the best approaches and to conceptualize and advocate for architectural and process improvements that will lead to more resilient and sustainable software over time.

The Product Teams shall:

• Define, author, and deliver code pursuant to Agile software development best practices that meets the needs of the taxpayers and conforms to the requirements and architecture provided by the government; peer review code for quality; incorporate testing and security considerations into code development.

• Ensure that all software associated with maintaining and operating Direct File is delivered and tracked on approved version control systems, such as GitHub.

• Continuously deploy code into lower environments and regularly deploy code to production environments with a target of at least one production deployment per day.

• Maintain proficiency with government software development tools, including git-based source control tools such as GitHub.

• Integrate with external systems and other systems to access appropriate data. All integrations shall be configured with code, utilize testing and instrumentation to discover and manage reliability issues, and be thoroughly documented.

• Develop, implement, and document data migration strategies/plan(s), including data migration from proprietary data centers to commercial cloud service providers.

• Implement all build, release, and deployment steps as versioned, tested, and source-controlled code. Comprehensively document the Direct File key specifications, dependencies, data elements, design and architecture decisions, integrations, and any other salient characteristics that would be useful to future teams supporting the Direct File. Approach system design in an “out-of-the-box” manner, using best practice approaches or preconfigured solutions, including libraries, components, modules, or other preconfigured increments of software, drawn from the open source community where possible with a focus on minimizing system customization with written code.

• Publish all components, source code, or software artifacts under an open source license on behalf of the Government for reuse in an open-source manner.

• Separate configuration and sensitive information from source code.

• Manage dependencies on other open-source libraries and tools and provide recommendations to IRS for continued use or updates.

• Maintain a list of Direct File opensource libraries and tools that are available for reuse.

• Store source code, technical data, configurations, documentation in publicly accessible source control repositories.

• Design and build products that are accessible to the widest range of taxpayers and devices; all products must be Section 508-compliant. It must go beyond simple accessibility compliance (e.g., it meets the requirements of Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act) and also be easy for taxpayers who use assistive technology to use.

4.8 OPERATIONS AND MONITORING

The Product Teams themselves manage and operate the products they develop. The Product Teams shall support IRS requirements for system monitoring, using the agency supported monitoring tools and processes as they exist and evolve over time.

Monitoring tools may include native Cloud Service Provider (CSP) monitoring tools.

Additionally, the Product Teams integrate all logs with appropriate monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, and/or ElasticSearch among others. The Product Teams create queries to support dashboards, reporting, and proactive alert generation based on system, operations, security, and business needs.

The Product Teams shall:

• Ensure all Direct File Service Level Agreements, as defined by IRS Leadership, are met, and that the product functions correctly.

• Deploy code regularly to all environments, including Development, Staging and Production.

• Provide 24x7 (or as otherwise defined by the IRS Product Owner) Production support for Direct File they built and manage.

• Provide Database Administration (DBA) support to cloud-based and hosted database systems as needed.

• Provide non-production environment support during normal business hours (8 am

– 8 pm EST).

• Work collaboratively with support-related stakeholders including but not limited to call centers, customer service platforms, and other teams as needed.

• Monitor system, network, application, database logs, and SLA metrics via approved monitoring tools and provide a real-time dashboard available to all program stakeholders.

• Write and monitor synthetic monitoring scripts for infrastructure and applications.

• Provide external systems integration support through configuring, testing, and documenting the integration.

• Perform infrastructure, operating system, and product updates, upgrades, and patches without system downtime.

• Document in the Monthly Status Report support metrics including but not limited to: number of issues reported, problem type identification, percent resolved, time for resolution, priority, and severity as requested.

• Perform postmortems of any outages occurred, including root cause analysis and steps to prevent future outages.

• Create synthetic scripts to obtain real-life metrics and statistics and create dashboards, monitoring, product reporting, and proactive alerting based on synthetic script monitoring tools utilized.

• Utilize monitoring plugins and agents to monitor numerical metrics provided by external services, servers, or equipment to collect more in-depth metrics.

• Use Email, Short Message Service (SMS), and other methods, such as Pagerduty, for alerting schedules, escalation policies and services that escalate system, infrastructure, or security issues to an on-call engineer. The Contractor shall acknowledge all alerts and remediate all issues per agency requirements.

• Establish and participate in monitoring of other agency upstream partner systems.

• Assist application development teams to identify proper reporting metrics and alerts to isolate external decencies from internal services.

• Provide assistance to internal and external teams to resolve issues during outages affecting external systems.

• Provide a Direct File Response Time Monitoring Report, appended to the Monthly Status Report, that provides Direct File response time frames at the 50th, 75th, 95th, and 99th percentiles for each product.

4.9 SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

The Product Teams develop and maintain Application/Infrastructure security documentation in support of achieving and maintaining an Authority to Operate (ATO) for Direct File.

The Product Teams shall:

• Comply with Government ATO process.

• Use FISMA control tracking system as the security documentation repository to complete and update security controls.

• Coordinate with the security office and adhere to its policies.

• Complete all Government required training (i.e. on-boarding, security, ethics, etc.) as well as provide certificates of completion to the COR.

• Create, as directed, a wide variety of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP800-Series security artifacts per FISMA requirements for IRS systems.

• Enter data into the agency security documentation repository.

• Manually review upcoming due dates for security artifacts and work with system maintainers or appropriate representatives to ensure artifacts are updated annually.

• Support and develop annual attestation documentation in conjunction with the system maintainer and business owner.

• Peer review security artifacts and provide feedback to document authors.

• Coordinate and lead quarterly familiarization exercise for Contingency Plan and Incident Response Plan.

• Provide security documentation reporting to PMs, Information Security officers (ISO), and others.

• Update existing Privacy Impact Analysis (PIA), System Security Plan (SSP) documents and create new PIA documents as required in support of IRS apps.

• Update ATO package as necessary.

4.10 DATA & METRICS

The Product Teams instrument metrics and monitoring and communicate data across the Direct File service and to IRS leadership so that the Government can make data-informed decisions to improve the product.

The Product Teams shall:

• Define important product, user, system and other metrics to track and implement monitoring and tracking of those data points.

• Collate data from various sources, including databases, logging, chat transcripts, third-party analytics solutions, surveys, and external data (i.e., Census).

• Transform data by implementing automated extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes to deliver data in the form most conducive to analysis.

• Analyze data by employing statistical techniques such as causal inference, time series analysis, and natural language processing. Present findings to decision-makers with clear description of confidence and uncertainty.

• Create dashboards, visualizations, reports, presentations and more so that key stakeholders at the IRS can understand the status of Direct File and identify meaningful changes to improve the product.

• Comply with all IRS guidance for data management, security, and taxpayer privacy.

• Regularly share data with the Direct File team and key stakeholders and construct a narrative around data in order to drive the team to make further progress on the product goals.

• Collaborate with user research, design, product, software engineering to identify the important data points and implement them.

4.11 ACCESSIBILITY

The Direct File team is highly committed to ensuring the product serves the needs of users with a wide range of disabilities that may impact their access to digital tools. While accessibility practitioners have specialized expertise, accessibility is a shared responsibility across all members of the Product Teams, regardless of Skill Area.

The Product Teams shall:

• Provide expert guidance on inclusive and accessibility best practices and strategy.

• Design and build products that are accessible to the widest range of taxpayers and devices; all products must be Section 508-compliant. It must go beyond simple accessibility compliance (e.g., it meets the requirements of Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act) and also be easy for taxpayers who use assistive technology to use.

• Work with the agency’s Section 508 Compliance office to ensure full compliance.

• Evaluate product for accessibility on the most commonly used accessible devices, at a minimum before each launch, major update, or new release. This includes meeting regularly with the agency’s 508 office to ensure compliance with their standards and requirements as they evolve over time.

• Provide expert guidance to determine which range of browsers and devices to target for testing as technology evolves in the commercial marketplace.

• Collaborate with the development teams to conduct automated and manual accessibility tests using common screen readers and diagnostic tools. At a minimum, this should be done before each launch, major update, and new release.

• Create and maintain an Accessibility Testing Plan and Report that delineates all devices upon which all routine accessibility tests are run. This shall be updated as 508 requirements and technologies evolve over the course of this project.

• Create and maintain an Accessibility Tracking Plan and Report which tracks products that have been tested for accessibility and submitted to Section 508 Office for smoke tests, plus the status of such tests.

• Create and maintain documentation for all related activities, recommendations, and decisions.

4.12 QUALITY ASSURANCE

The Direct File Product Teams ensure the quality of the delivered software and services through continuous quality assurance activities throughout the product lifecycle in collaboration with other Skill Areas.

The Product Teams shall:

• Develop and implement a quality assurance plan for software functionality, which may include manual and automated tests performed by subject matter experts, QA testers and more. The plan should include definitions of done and complete and ensure that software complies with those definitions.

• Perform quality assurance testing as needed across the Direct File service.

Create automated tests, manual tests to ensure software meets the expected functionality definitions and high quality.

• Collaborate with developers to implement strategies that increase test coverage of key areas of concern and prevent regressions.

• Identify and track bugs and defects in the software and prioritize the backlog of work to fix QA issues found in the testing.

• Analyze bugs and defects data to improve the quality assurance plan to better target potential areas of concern.

• Ensure testing activities are adequately documented for audit and compliance purposes.

5.0 PRODUCT SCOPE

Product Teams will not be handed detailed requirements. Rather, they will be expected to conduct user research and partner with IRS stakeholders to design and prioritize functionality that addresses goals established by IRS leadership. It is important to outline goals for a product or service early in its development. These goals in turn will define success metrics to evaluate the product’s performance and help to align the research and design work of the project around testing hypotheses that evaluate potential choices in light of how they will impact those success metrics.

The Direct File product has three product goals:

• Completion. Taxpayers who start a return are able to successfully file. We might measure this as the percentage of eligible taxpayers starting a return who either have their e-filed return accepted or mail a paper return (if they cannot e-file).

This goal would be adversely affected by issues that lead to abandonment, or if rejected returns are not resolved.

• Accuracy. Taxpayers file accurately and receive the benefits to which they are entitled. There are a variety of metrics we might use to track this goal, from the rate at which IRS rejects returns due to calculation error, to uptake rates for credits like EITC, to rates at which a claimed credit is later disallowed. Notably this goal is not merely limited to the tool’s ability to correctly do the math, but also includes how it supports a taxpayer in providing accurate information.

• Experience. Filing imposes less burden on taxpayers, requiring less time and money, and reducing the psychological costs of an often-stressful task. There are important quantifiable metrics to evaluate performance toward this goal, such as time to completion and customer satisfaction. But also, as discussed in the recent OIRA memo M-22-10, it is important to qualitatively evaluate potential psychological costs that individuals may experience to identify sources of “cognitive load, discomfort, stress, anxiety, increased institutional distrust, or loss of sense of autonomy.”

5.1 WORKING PRINCIPLES

Regardless of skill area, everyone on the Product Team shall work together to:

1. Follow the practices described in the “Digital Services Playbook” (https://playbook.cio.gov).

2. Develop lean processes and documentation.

3. Follow Agile methodology ceremonies such as (but not limited to) sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, sprint retrospective, backlog grooming, and estimating.

4. Work iteratively by creating minimal viable products and by breaking tasks into bite-sized pieces that can be designed and deployed regularly.

5. Actively involve taxpayers in the design, building, and testing of all solutions.

6. Optimize products for mobile-first operation, with all solutions being equally usable on mobile and desktop.

7. Protect taxpayer information with best-in-class security, given the constraints of the environment. Prioritize security over compliance.

8. Incorporate robust inclusive and accessibility best practices into design, content, research, and development and testing to ensure high-quality digital experiences to all taxpayers, including those who use of assistive technology.

9. Automate all unit, integration, functional, and load tests and achieve 100% test coverage of all functionalities delivered.

10. Ensure configuration and sensitive data, including data the IRS defines as sensitive, are not present in source code, and are stored in encrypted credential management systems.

11. Deliver all code as Open Source Software pursuant to OMB Guidance M-16-21.

12. Cultivate positive, trusting, and cooperative working relationships with the

Government and all other Contractors supporting this work. Establish and maintain integrated, cross-functional and cross-organizational (e.g., having Contractor and Government members) teams to enhance communication, share lessons learned, and facilitate rapid identification and mitigation of dependencies between various functional entities.

13. Support and comply with all guidelines and standards as defined by the IRS.

6.0 DESCRIPTION OF TASKS

This contract is a performance based, hybrid contract type of Firm Fixed Price (FFP) and Labor Hour (LH) tasks.

Task Summary Table:

Task # Title Contract Type

001 Task 1 – Program Management Support FFP

002 Task 2 – Research, Design, Content, Translation LH

003 Task 3 – Engineering, Development, Operations, Security, Data, Quality Assurance

LH

004 Task 6 – Transition-Out (Optional) LH

6.1 TASK 001: PROGRAM MANAGEMENT SUPPORT (FFP)

The Contractor shall identify a Program Manager (PM), as key personnel, with the responsibility for the overall coordination and management of the work required as well as the quality of all products and services delivered within the contract. This individual shall act as the primary point of contact with the government on contract performance issues. The PM shall serve as the primary point of contact for the Government’s Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) in all matters concerning this contract and performance, and will interact with other government employees as appropriate.

The PM shall provide management, direction, administration, quality assurance, and leadership in the execution of this contract.

The Contractor PM shall work with Direct File Product Teams to define project management and governance. The PM is responsible for all deliverables and services provided under this PWS and full management authority for all support for this requirement and personnel assigned to work on this project.

• Reporting Requirements

The Contractor shall provide the COR with Monthly Progress Reports in electronic format. These reports shall reflect data as of the last day of the preceding Month.

The Monthly Progress Reports shall cover all work completed during the reporting period and work planned for the subsequent reporting period. A combination of sprint reports and sprint planning documentation is sufficient for this purpose. The report shall include:

• Metrics of success.

• Any problems that arose and a description of how the problems were resolved. If problems have not been completely resolved, the Contractor shall provide an explanation including their plan and timeframe for resolving the issue.

• The report shall also include an itemized list of all Contractor’s individual team member completed and incomplete deliverables, and rationales and expectations for incomplete deliverables.

• The current Section 508 conformance status of each deliverable (if appropriate).

It is expected that the Contractor will keep in communication with IRS accordingly so that issues that arise are transparent to both parties to prevent escalation of outstanding issues.

The Contractor shall provide the COR with Monthly Time & Materials/Labor Hour Reports in electronic format. These reports shall reflect data as of the last day of the preceding Month.

A. Expenditures for the reporting period by labor, material and ODCs.

B. Burn Rate and when funding is expected to run out given current Burn Rate.

C. Labor costs shall be broken down by assigned numbering system for contract, Task Order and labor category, entity (Prime or Subcontractor), rates and hours.

D. Material costs and ODCs shall be identified by type, and subcontractor (as applicable), and discussed briefly to indicate for what the material and/or ODC was used.

E. Total task expenditures for the fiscal year to date, indicated as total, labor, materials and ODCs.

F. Total task expenditures since Task Order award, indicated as total, labor, materials and ODCs.

Deliverables:

• Monthly Status Report

• T&M / Labor Hour Status Report

6.1.1 Contractor Onboarding Documentation and Training

Requirements

The Contractor shall submit to the COR all on-boarding paperwork and documentation as required by all applicable IRS onboarding requirements, to ensure the timely on-boarding of contractor staff.

Contractor Staff Roster: The Contractor shall submit a staff roster to the COR. This report shall include all Contractor and Subcontractor employees and be provided within three (3) business days after award for all personnel employed to begin their background investigations. As personnel changes occur a revised roster is required.

The Contractor Staff Roster shall be updated and delivered only to the COR within one

(1) day of any changes in employee status, training certification completion status, Background Investigation level status, additions/removal of employees, etc., throughout the Period of Performance. The Contractor Staff Roster shall indicate which employees are active or inactive. For inactive employees, the roster shall indicate the date the employee was separated from the Task Order and when their credentials were returned to the COR. This report shall include the Status of Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) assigned to contractor staff.

Deliverable:

• Staff Roster

6.1.2 Kickoff Meeting

A post award conference will be held in accordance with 1052.242-70, Post Award Conference. Within five (5) business days of award or other mutually agreed upon date, the Contractor shall meet with Government representatives at a mutually agreed upon location or via teleconference. The intent of this meeting is to initiate the communication process between the IRS and the Contractor by introducing key participants, explaining their roles, reviewing communication ground rules, and assuring a common understanding of the requirements and objectives.

The meeting shall include an introduction of those in attendance and discussion of the successful contractor’s approach and plan for scope of work. The Contractor shall provide meeting notes (inclusive of any follow-up actions) to the Government within five

(5) business days after the meeting.

The completion of this meeting shall result in the following:

1. The Contractor and Government personnel who will perform work under this award will be introduced.

2. Any issues concerning the Contractor clearances for contractor personnel will be discussed.

3. The Contractor shall demonstrate confirmation of their understanding of the work to be accomplished under this PWS.

4. The Contractor shall provide the accounting period end dates to be used for the term of this award.

DESIRED OUTCOME – Initiate the communication process between the Government and Contractor to assure a common understanding of award requirements, objectives, and deadlines. Contractor delivers Kickoff Briefing Minutes to COR within five (5) business days after Briefing.

Deliverable:

• Kickoff Meeting Minutes

6.2 TASK 0002: RESEARCH, DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT, OPERATIONS,

AND/OR SECURITY (LH)

All Product Teams shall perform the following activities in association with the work outlined in those areas identified in Section 4.0: Functional Areas:

6.2.3 Product Plan and Roadmap

The Product Teams shall collaboratively prepare and maintain a Product Plan and Roadmap. This Product Plan and Roadmap will serve as the canonical source of information about the product, including a description of the problem the product is attempting to solve, summaries of formative research, and a discussion of the team’s approach. Most critically, the Product Plan and Roadmap must include the product’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) established in concert with the Government Product Owner and key stakeholders, as well evaluation KPI methodologies. All KPIs shall be designed to allow the team to effectively objectively evaluate the product against user needs throughout the life of the product.

DESIRED OUTCOME: Individuals in all teams work collaboratively accomplish goals and features as identified by IRS leadership and product Owners.

6.2.4 Backlog Management

In consultation with the Government Product Owner and the Product Plan and Roadmap, the Product Teams shall continuously develop and groom a backlog of tasks based on user needs derived from meaningful user research. Before work commences on a task in the backlog, the task shall include a description of the user need being addressed, references to specific artifacts describing the user need, a proposed approach to meet the user need, and an estimate of the relative complexity of the approach.

6.2.5 Sprint Management

Prior to the beginning of a sprint, the Government Product Owner, in collaboration with the Product Teams and other key stakeholders, shall prioritize the backlog and use it to generate a Sprint Plan. The Sprint Plan shall include the work to be accomplished for the upcoming sprint, as well as clearly defined overall acceptance criteria for the sprint, and must be accepted by the Product Owner prior to the sprint commencing. While the task’s approach and hypothesis are expected to change throughout the duration of the sprint as the team learns new information, the goals and acceptance criteria contained in Sprint Plan and the Contractor’s level of effort shall remain unchanged.

At the conclusion of the sprint, the Product Teams shall provide a Sprint Demonstration that confirms all functionality developed in the sprint is operational and meets the Sprint Plan’s acceptance criteria. The Product Teams shall also submit a Sprint Certification Package to the Product Owner and COR for review and acceptance.

The Sprint Certification Package shall include a summary of the planned, accomplished, and unaccomplished work for the two-week sprint to include issues encountered and corrective actions taken as well as references to all artifacts produced during the sprint.

Deliverables:

• Product Plan & Roadmap

• Sprint Certification Package

• User Research Plans & Summaries

• Content Drafts

• UX artifacts created during the process (e.g., journey maps, diagrams, wireframes, prototypes)

6.3 TASK 0003: ENGINEERING, DEVELOPMENT, OPERATIONS,

SECURITY, DATA, AND QUALITY ASSURANCE (LH)

All Product Teams shall perform the following activities in association with the work outlined in those areas identified in Section 4.0: Functional Areas:

6.3.6 Product Plan and Roadmap

The Product Teams shall collaboratively prepare and maintain a Product Plan and Roadmap. This Product Plan and Roadmap will serve as the canonical source of information about the product, including a description of the problem the product is attempting to solve, summaries of formative research, and a discussion of the team’s approach. Most critically, the Product Plan and Roadmap must include the product’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) established in concert with the Government Product Owner and key stakeholders, as well evaluation KPI methodologies. All KPIs shall be designed to allow the team to effectively objectively evaluate the product against user needs throughout the life of the product.

Desired outcome: Individuals in all teams work collaboratively accomplish goals and features as identified by IRS leadership and product Owners.

6.3.7 Backlog Management

In consultation with the Government Product Owner and the Product Plan and Roadmap, the Product Teams shall continuously develop and groom a backlog of tasks based on user needs derived from meaningful user research. Before work commences on a task in the backlog, the task shall include a description of the user need being addressed, references to specific artifacts describing the user need, a proposed approach to meet the user need, and an estimate of the relative complexity of the approach.

6.3.8 Sprint Management

Prior to the beginning of a sprint, the Government Product Owner, in collaboration with the Product Teams and other key stakeholders, shall prioritize the backlog and use it to generate a Sprint Plan. The Sprint Plan shall include the work to be accomplished for the upcoming sprint, as well as clearly defined overall acceptance criteria for the sprint, and must be accepted by the Product Owner prior to the sprint…