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June 30, 2011 at 08:00 PM
WASHINGTON BUREAU — The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says Internal Revenue Service (IRS) top managers must do more to ensure smooth implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
IRS officials are not doing enough to ensure on-time and on-target implementation of the 47 PPACA provisions that it will be responsible for complying with through 2018, James White, a GAO director, writes in a report summarizing the GAO’s findings.
“While implementation for some provisions is years away, making improvements 
to the planning process now would reduce risks and might minimize future problems,” White says.
To ensure compliance, the IRS “must improve aspects of its planning, particularly at an agencywide or strategic level,” White says.
The RS has defined strategic-level goals and project plans in multiple documents but has not integrated the goals or plans, White says.
White says the GAO has given briefings to members of Congress and their staff on its findings, starting June 8, in response to lawmakers’ concerns that the IRS would not be able to properly implement PPACA provisions on their effective dates.
In its briefings, GAO officials have said that the IRS management team has not developed a timeline for developing performance measures and collecting associated data.
The IRS also has not provided a cost estimate for all of PPACA, and the risk management framework does not assure that all risks, especially strategic-level risks, are identified and analyzed, White says.
