How the IRS gets its Web site ready for April 15
Millions of procrastinating Americans will tackle their 2006 tax returns during the next few days, but the Internal Revenue Service says it’s ready for all of those last-minute electronic filers to hit the send button.
The IRS and a team of leading network vendors spend nine months of the year getting its popular Web site ready for the busy season, which this year will have run from Jan. 15 to April 17.
During tax season, IRS.gov is one of the Internet’s most heavily trafficked sites.
The agency taps the expertise of Accenture, Qwest Communications, Akamai, IBM and others to keep IRS.gov up and running.
“The hit to our network infrastructure has been growing as fast as the number of electronically filed returns,’’ says Jimi Stricklin, deputy director of IRS portal program management. “Because of our traffic spike, we are trying to make sure our systems are refreshed and able to handle a load that’s increasing 9% every year overall. We definitely have to scramble to keep our systems up to date.’’
IRS.gov is seeing record traffic this year: It handled more than 90 million visits and 590 million page views from January through mid-March.
“We are up 9% year over year in visits, and 1.3% year over year in page views,’’ says Bert DuMars, director of electronic tax administration for the IRS. “A year ago at the same time, we had 82 million visits and 582 million page views.’’
The number of visitors to IRS.gov has been increasing 9% to 10% a year for the past five years.
The IRS and its vendors redesigned the site 18 months ago to make it easier for visitors to navigate. This has caused the number of page views per visit to plateau because visitors can find the information they need faster.
“We were seeing huge spikes in our search usage. We were up to 80 queries per second prior to the redesign,’’ DuMars says. “When we did the redesign, the number of search queries was cut in half. People are finding what they are looking for faster. If you do a good design, you get more efficient traffic.’’
In addition to IRS.gov, the IRS runs a private Web portal for tax preparers such as H&R Block and software vendors such as Intuit, which sells the popular TurboTax package. These organizations have secure, leased-line connections to the IRS, and they send batches of individual tax returns to the agency.
The rise in electronic tax filing accounts for much of the traffic on IRS.gov and its private portal. The agency says that the number of individual electronic tax filers is growing at a rate of 5.5% a year and has topped 51 million this year.
The number of corporations that file their taxes electronically is growing even faster — an increase of 187% this year compared with last year. Businesses have been able to file their returns electronically for three years.
“Last year, for the entire year, we had 932,000 business returns come in through our registered user portal. This year, we’ve already exceeded 1.5 million,’’ DuMars says. “We’re seeing huge growth and huge usage.’’
Corporate returns place a greater burden on the IRS network.
“Corporate returns are far larger than individual returns,’’ DuMars says. “Individual returns are 25 kilobytes to 50 kilobytes, maybe a little bigger. But corporate returns are as high as 235 megabytes. A partnership return can exceed 1 gigabyte in size.’’
To handle all of this traffic, the IRS has turned over management of IRS.gov to a team of network vendors led by Accenture. The company has been managing the IRS.gov site since 2001, when it won a five-year, $33.6 million contract to redesign and host the site. The Accenture contract was extended and will expire in November 2008.
Originally an informational Web site, IRS.gov has focused on electronic filing for the past four years.
“We have now shifted from a publishing or information-only Web site to really being a site that helps the IRS drive its business imperatives and goals,’’ says Armand J. Santoro, senior executive in Accenture’s federal government practice.
IRS.gov is hosted at two of Qwest’s data centers, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast. The two data centers have a high-speed Internet connection between them.
The IRS uses the Web caching service from Akamai to push IRS.gov content closer to users and help reduce the site’s traffic load. Akamai says it offloads 91% of the traffic from IRS.gov.
Both IRS.gov and the private portal are built on Sun platforms. For software, the IRS uses IBM’s WebSphere and Vignette’s content management system.
IRS.gov has not suffered an outage since 2001, according to Accenture.
“This portal has never been down,’’ Santoro says. “We maintain 100% uptime, 100% availability for IRS.gov.’’
The network vendors help the IRS prepare for a huge but predictable surge of Web traffic during the tax season.
“In December of 2006, the hits on the IRS.gov Web site were 4.4 million. That ramped up to 13 million in January,’’ says Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager for Qwest Government Services. “That’s a 200% increase month over month.’’
IRS.gov sees its first big traffic spike in mid-January, when individuals in search of rebates submit their electronic files. Most of the site’s traffic comes from mid-February through the end of March. The site also sees a final traffic spike during the last week of filing season.
This year, the IRS is bracing for a surge of Web site traffic on April 17. Akamai, which has supported IRS.gov for four years, says 20% of the site’s tax season traffic is received on the last day of the tax filing deadline.
Mike Friedel, director of public sector sales for Akamai, says that during the tax season IRS.gov traffic rises 400% to 600% above non-tax season traffic.
“And it grows every year, as more and more people are using the tools and facilities that are available to them online,’’ Friedel says.
April 18 will be a brief reprieve for the IRS IT shop. But by end of the April, the agency and its contractors will start holding meetings to discuss hardware and software changes needed to ensure its Web sites have enough capacity to handle the traffic load for next year.
Our Web site planning process “really never stops,’’ Stricklin says. “We are continuously looking at what our load is, what we’re expecting and how we can leverage the infrastructure and tools to accommodate it.’’
“Once the 2007 tax season is over, we look at all the statistics and the data we have and then we’ll begin to prepare for 2008,’’ Gowen adds. “We have six to seven months to make whatever changes we feel need to be made. And then we can handle the surge between December and January.’’
IRS sees no end in sight to continued growth in usage of IRS.gov and its private portal.
“Congress set a goal of 80% of all individual tax returns being electronically filed. Last year, we reached 54%. This year we’ll be close to 60%,’’ DuMars says. “We still have a good growth curve ahead of us. That keeps us on our toes for capacity planning.’’
