IRS Names Tax System ContractorsIRS Names Tax System Contractors

Top 20 Government Cloud Service Providers

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has named the 30 companies that will provide IT support, maintenance, and modernization for the agency's legacy tax systems, potentially for the next 10 years.

A complete list of the companies -- which includes top federal contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman -- has been posted online.

The companies each were awarded a one-year contract with nine one-year renewal options through the IRS's Total Information Processing Support Services-4 (TIPSS-4) program.

On the list with the usual suspects -- which in addition to Lockheed and Northrop include AT&T, Booz Allen, CSC, and IBM -- the IRS awarded eight small businesses TIPSS4 contracts. Small businesses have long griped they have been left out of the bidding process for federal IT procurements, a scenario the government has been working to change.

Among small businesses that will be working with the IRS through the TIPSS-4 awards are Citizant, an IT services provider that serves both military and civilian agencies; CSSS.Net, which specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions: and InSysCo, which provides systems integration and IT consulting.

The IRS TIPSS-4 is the agency's contract vehicle for a range of services to support its myriad legacy tax systems. The agency is currently in the middle of an ambitious and challenging multibillion-dollar effort to upgrade its IT systems that began in 1999.

Services the firms are contracted to provide under TIPSS-4 include: design, development, deployment, operations, and maintenance of IRS IT systems; cybersecurity, including risk analysis, new procedures, and changes to existing systems; project management and tools for managing, tracking, reporting, and transitioning large-scale systems; and configuration management, according to the IRS.