Inactive

**The slides from Industry Day have been posted. **Initial RFI Questions and Answers (Q&A) have been released. All individuals registered for industry day should have received the link for the MS Team... **The slides from Industry Day have been posted. **Initial RFI Questions and Answers (Q&A) have been released. All individuals registered for industry day should have received the link for the MS Teams meeting to occur at 1:00 pm Eastern Time on 8/20/2024. Please contact Leigh Anne Romo at leigh.a.romo@irs.gov ASAP if you have registered for the event and have not received the meeting link. **The IRS CIG Industry Day is scheduled for 1:00 pm Eastern Time on 8/20/2024. Registration for this event is required no later than 7:00 pm Eastern Time on 8/15/2024. To register, please send an email to the Contracting Officer, Leigh Anne Romo at leigh.a.romo@irs.gov with the email subject: "IRS CIG Industry Day Registration." Please include the following information in the registration email: name, email address, company, and position/title (see attached CIG Industry Day Registration spreadsheet). An MS Teams and/or teleconference link will be provided to registered attendees 24-48 hours prior to the event date. Due to the expected interest and capacity limitations of the IRS's Microsoft (MS) Teams application, the IRS is requesting no more than two participants per company.** **Please note that this RFI is also posted on GSA eBuy! Duplicate responses are not needed or desired. Customer Integration Gateway (CIG) Request for Information (RFI) Introduction The Customer Integration Gateway (CIG) is intended to replace the Integrated Enterprise Portal (IEP). The IEP provides the primary digital gateway and platform connecting taxpayers, third parties, tax practitioners, and employees with the IRS. The current IEP vendor provides a range of application development, hosting, security, and operations services for approximately 100 IRS business applications, many of which enable delivery of the annual federal Tax Filing Season. In a time when IRS needs to deliver increasingly more complex solutions to taxpayers more quickly, IRS needs to take control of its infrastructure and provide more agile solution delivery options to its development teams. The CIG will increase control and centralize management of application hosting infrastructure, enabling development teams to test and deploy new capabilities to accelerate business value accordingly. The IRS anticipates awarding a new Information Technology managed services contract for CIG services during FY2025. I. Background on the IRS Mission The IRS collects the revenue to fund the federal government and administer the nation’s tax laws. During 2022, the IRS processed over 260 million tax returns and supplemental documents. The IRS administers and collects revenue from a variety of taxes, including individual and business income, estate and gift, employment, and excise taxes. In addition to interactions with individual taxpayers, the IRS routinely interacts with small and large businesses, partnerships, domestic and foreign financial institutions, governmental organizations (including federal, state, and foreign entities), Indian Tribal governments, tax-exempt entities (such as charitable organizations, foundations, universities and trusts), and a wide spectrum of intermediaries and professionals who support effective tax administration including: payment and payroll service providers, enrolled agents, Certified Public Accountants, and return preparers. The IRS employs approximately 83,000 employees who are geographically dispersed over nearly 500 locations. In August 2022, Congress enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), giving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a historic opportunity to transform the administration of the tax system and the services provided to taxpayers. The IRA provides the IRS with the opportunity to significantly improve the way it serves the public. The IRS will transform services to taxpayers by using this long-term funding to update technology capabilities and invest in our employees with new tools, skills, and capabilities. These resources will also ensure the fairness of the tax system by addressing the tax gap. The IRS is focusing on a series of improvements to the tax administration system: a more integrated and secure delivery of taxpayer services, a movement to administer taxes through more efficient customer-focused channels, and a more streamlined compliance program that identifies and resolves issues sooner, along with a stronger set of foundational capabilities to support those efforts. Additional information about the IRS strategic plan and goals, organizational structure, program statistics, and Future State Initiative is available through the links below: New IRS Strategic Plan: Agency issues five-year plan with goal to help taxpayers Publication 3744 (Rev. 4-2023) - Inflation Reduction Act Strategic Operating Plan Publication 3744-B (4-2024) (irs.gov) – Inflation Reduction Act Strategic Operating Plan Annual Update Today's IRS Organization IRS Tax Statistics Statistics of Income (SOI) Tax Stats - IRS Data Book II. Current State, Challenges, and Priorities of the Customer Integration Gateway (CIG) The IRS is analyzing how best to acquire CIG services, including how to engage the services of small businesses. The IRS is seeking industry input to assist in formulating the acquisition approach that gives the IRS access to the best technical solutions and managed service providers. The CIG contract is intended to serve as a transition to enable the IRS to move towards a Future State for IRS portal services. Future State objectives include: Change name from Integrated Enterprise Portal to Customer Integration Gateway (CIG) to align to CIO’s vision of IT working with business and the restructuring of IT operation models to accelerate “value”. Transition from a single managed service provider model to a “multi-provider under IRS control” model. Transition phase will help IRS to build out the picture of the future state and define the plan to implement it. IRS will extend its IT Operations Center/Security Operations Center monitoring into the CIG. IRS will fully integrate the CIG with its External Partner Zone (Cloud Access Security Broker). IRS will integrate its common services (i.e., Identity and Access Management, API Gateways) with the CIG. IRS will connect its enterprise CI/CD pipelines to control and manage the CIG IaaS/PaaS components end-to-end. IRS will modernize or retire legacy on-premises portal applications and decommission data centers. IRS will have transparency to all operations and requisite costs to enable optimization of all financial operations to manage and control costs for the CIG. IRS will integrate the CIG with external government-owned community clouds. The attached PDF titled “CIG Transition Phase – RFI Diagram” provides an overview of how CIG will organize services as it enables a transition to the Future State described above. The CIG acquisition will differ from the prior IEP acquisitions in that the IRS expects to award Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPA) to multiple vendors and potentially separate service delivery by hosting models (e.g., private data center, cloud). Currently, the IEP is the primary gateway for external users – including taxpayers, third-party tax preparers, and other business partners – and internal users – IRS employees and contractors with staff-like access – to access IRS business services. The IEP 1.5 contract (TIRNO-17-D-00004) was awarded to Accenture Federal Services on February 15, 2017. The initial IDIQ ceiling was $692M, with a potential ordering period of up to eight and half years (1 Base Year, 4 Option Years, up to three Award Terms, and one 6-month 52.217-8 optional extension period). The current IDIQ ceiling is $1.337B and the ordering period expires on August 14, 2025. The IEP vendor provides a range of application development, hosting, security, and operations services for approximately 100 IRS business applications. Some of the IEP-hosted application suites, such as Modernized eFile (MeF) and Integrated Customer Communications Environment (ICCE), including multiple applications that are critical to the IRS’ core mission: delivering a successful Filing Season annually. The IRS is seeking vendors to provide services and support in the transformation of its portals, now referred to as the CIG. The IRS seeks qualified vendors to deliver, operate, manage, and evolve CIG services to support the changing dynamics driven by modernization and Congressional mandates placed on the IRS. The CIG vendors will be expected to continue to provide the IRS with secure application hosting services, allowing it to deliver business functionality to its various stakeholders, including taxpayers, tax preparers, and employees. The current vendor delivers these services through fully scalable, virtualized environments and cloud services that are dedicated to the IRS. The current solution provides fully integrated core services, including IT infrastructure, operations, security, application, integration and support, and program management services, to establish a robust platform that supports multiple workloads, also referred to as Portals and major applications, and application styles. Additionally, the Government expects the CIG vendors to provide fully managed, scalable hosting services for applications that are accessed by IRS’ external stakeholders and its internal customers. The selected vendors will be responsible for providing all labor, hardware, software, equipment, materials, communications, facilities, and other necessary IT infrastructure to implement, deploy, operate, manage, and support the hosted applications and services in a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) moderate secure environment, as well as its underlying technology infrastructure. The CIG contract will be the primary digital gateway and platform connecting taxpayers, third parties, tax practitioners, and employees to the IRS. This requirement is planned for solicitation via the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Supply Schedules (FSS) Program, under North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code 541512, Computer Systems Design Services. The Government intends to issue Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPA) to multiple qualified vendors. The anticipated BPA ordering period includes a 12-month base period with up to four (4) 12-month option periods. III. RFI Questions for Industry Input/Response The CIG solution must be able to function within the existing enterprise architecture and evolve to support progress towards the Future State. The purpose of this RFI is to ascertain the extent to which solutions can support the Future State vision and are compatible with existing platforms. The IRS requests that responses to this RFI be provided no later than 7:00 PM Eastern Time on 8/23/2024, via an e-mail (with the subject line “IRS CIG RFI”) to the IRS Contracting Officer, Leigh.A.Romo@irs.gov. Please keep responses to 10 pages or less in total. Unless otherwise noted, the IRS generally expects responses to the individual questions to be a short paragraph. Format for responses shall be in Times New Roman, 12-point font with 1-inch margins. There is no guarantee that the IRS will have funding or issue a solicitation for this potential requirement, nor will it reimburse any costs associated with responding to this RFI. The IRS acknowledges that industry partners can expend substantial resources responding to RFIs. The IRS hopes that the current volume and specificity of the information provided in this RFI underscores its interest in identifying existing capabilities and expanding competition for any potential future acquisition. The IRS seeks responses to the following: Company Overview a. Provide a brief description of your company, to include the following: Size (small business size standard for NAICS 541512 is $34M in average annual receipts) Unique Entity ID (UEI) Overarching value proposition (e.g., solutions provider, application developer, cloud service provider, private data center provider, value-added reseller, hardware) b. Company capabilities. c. Are you currently providing, or have you recently provided, similar services in scope, size and complexity to any government or commercial entity? If so, please provide the agency’s name, contract number and contract value with a description of the work provided and approximate start/end dates. Please identify each of the CIG service areas your company has experience delivering and include contract information for each of the service areas. d. Which government-wide acquisition contract(s) (GWACs), GSA Schedules or Best in Class (BIC) contracts does your organization hold that may accommodate the work described in the associated draft Performance Work Statement (PWS)? Please provide the schedule or GWAC number(s). e. Recommended contracting and pricing approaches to give the IRS enhanced transparency and management oversight of the costs of commercial cloud service providers and private data center providers. f. Identify needed Government furnished information (GFI) to build a responsive technical and cost quote. g. Would you require a Contractor Teaming Arrangement (CTA) (FAR 9.6) to fully meet the CIG scope of work shown in the PWS? If yes, have you previously provided like services under this CTA? h. Please indicate if you are solely interested in subcontract opportunities and are unlikely to submit a quote as a prime contractor. Multi-award Approach a. Referring to the attached diagram (CIG Transition Phase – RFI Diagram), the IRS is contemplating breaking up the CIG work as follows: Providing secure external gateway functionality for all CIG workloads and hosting for non-cloud ready applications Providing hosting for workloads in IRS-controlled cloud Providing cloud professional services for workloads hosted in other cloud landing zones (e.g., T-Cloud) Identify approaches and dependencies for possibly breaking up the IEP services across more than one vendor while minimizing integration risk and oversight challenges. b. Identify the performance risks and risk mitigation approaches of having multiple managed service providers delivering CIG services. c. Provide any recommendations to update the current CIG Service Area(s)/workloads that maintain post-award competition and mitigate performance risks. d. What examples, whether as a prime or subcontractor, have you performed under multi-award approaches? If applicable, specifically identify these under Company Overview, section c. e. Provide performance standard recommendations (e.g., service level objectives) for the IRS to ensure and incentivize delivery of quality services in a multi-vendor environment. f. Based on the draft BPA PWS and current QASP, in lieu of award terms, identify candidate performance incentives. Government Furnished Information (GFI) CIG Transition Phase – RFI Diagram Current State of IEP Systems and Services Document Draft CIG BPA Performance Work Statement (PWS) Draft CIG Service Level Objectives (SLOs)