SAVE Award 2011 Department of the Treasury

As natural disasters happen all over the world our country raises millions of dollars through telethons and other simple ways of asking for donations. We raised over $300 million for Haiti, $65 million and counting for Japan, and over a billion for katrina. Instead of raising taxes, how about asking for help? If our government hosted a telethone with celebraties, professional atheletes and community leaders volunteering ...more »

Incorporate a system to allow taxpayers to submit their documentation directly to thier examiner either thru email or a special system. This will eliminate the need for clerical staff or at least a smaller staff, save on supply money such as paper, envelopes and such as well as putting less burden on the taxpayer's. The office communicator is a great source of communication that can eliminate most of the land line phone ...more »

Income earned and treated as tax-free in the AOR needs to be reviewed. The tax-free amount should be pro-rated based on the number of days in the AOR out of the entire month. It would be interesting to learn the number of temporary duty rotations (or flight crews touching down in AOR for minimum number of days) to learn how many trips cross over into two months to qualify 2 months as tax free versus one. Pro-rating ...more »

My name is Hank Bram Slikker. I work for the US Treasury at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Fort Worth, Texas. I have been employed since January 1999 as a bookbinder in the Mechanical Exam section of Currency Manufacturing. I want to respond to your request for saving costs for the United States government. My suggestion is this: our section in Currency Manufacturing can save thousands of dollars of supervisory ...more »

I developed that identifies imminent Mid-Year Appraisals, Annual Appraisals and Grade-Step Increases within the Department of Treasury. (The database identifies appraisals that are due within 60 days of the current date.) The database is user-friendly for the end-user and provides automated reports that identified imminent due dates. In addition, the database will: Reduce the number of late appraisals input on ...more »

I believe that Continuing Professional Education Programs (CPE's) do not need to be held at a centralized location. It costs thousands of dollars for a hotel room, an airline ticket and food, as well as various other expenses to send all the employees to a centralized location. While some training at a centralized location is necessary, many classes, including CPE, may be taught effectively by telecommunications, such ...more »

All agencies are basically following the same or similar guidelines for design and analysis, CMMI etc., when developing or modifying electronic data processing systems – although, presumably, each agency develops their own processes and standard documentation requirements based on agency needs. Although I am not advocating that every agency follow exactly the same development standards, I believe that each agency needs ...more »

IRS is stuffing envelopes in hundreds of thousands of letters (105C letters & 106C) quarterly and wasting time & money because the envelopes are not required by the IRM or IRC. management has declined my previous idea and their response was "Your request is for programming upgrades to the AMS system, and it has been determined that no changes can be made at this time due to costs and lack of available manpower".

My solution to the problem is to give federal employees the option to volunteer to be furloughed before furloughing all federal employees. You will be surprised how many people may volunteer to be laid off for two weeks, even without pay. There are many permanent employees who would like to take time off; however, they may not have enough vacation or sick time to do so. Some government agencies do not allow for ...more »

BSA Examiners look at check cashiers, wire services, money order sales,and precious metals. During these Exams it is common to find money that is being laundered and not taxed. The most common meathod is by cashing business checks at a check cashier and then getting cash payouts. The amount of diverted income can be quite large one exam uncovered over $2,000,000 at one location. The money trail is easy to follow since ...more »

I think we could decrease the number of hard copies for the Document 11678 which is the NTEU National Agreement booklet that is 229 pages in length. This document is easily available and accessible online. I know there may still be a need to have hard copies; however I believe if every organization and departments in IRS reduced the number of hard copies within units we could see a nice cost savings. I don't know the ...more »

I have noticed that a good part of the time phone assistors expend time is processing return transcripts requests. These are mostly sent by fax or mail. Taxpayers request transcripts using sometimes more than one method, several times, and every year for the same purposes. The Service should establish a $1.00 fee per request, and migrate the request service to internet or telephone automated system to be delivered by ...more »

1)This is the last day so I am combining all my ideas.I am a Revenue Officer we print and input to our computers Accurint on every case even before we try to make a field call. If we contact the person and make arrangements to full pay the time and cost was wasted. Also there is no need to print this information when it is available online. 2)We spend money on case file folders and shipping to send our cases to the ...more »

Taxpayers can walk in to our office, sit down with our taxpayer representatives and begin their request for service. No matter what language they speak they can use the Tablet to either type the tax question or say their tax question and the Tablet will covert their question into the language understood by the taxpayer representative. The monitor and keyboard can be used by either one as they communicate what needs ...more »

IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TAC) are slowly being required to scan checks received from taxpayers using the RS-PCC (Remittance Strategy for Paper Check Conversion)tool. (Eventually all departments within IRS will be using this system). The program is great and allows the Treasury to recognize payments within days instead of weeks. However, to save some money, the requirement to key verify should be changed. Employees ...more »