Providing 21 Experts for the Price of 6

Background

To help meet its responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the IRS created the ACA Information Returns (AIR) system, to receive, validate, and process Healthcare Information Returns, Information Reports, and related healthcare electronic submissions. Given the importance of the AIR system to the successful launch of ACA, the IRS assembled a team of industry leading commercial vendors to build the solution. Knowing how invaluable STP’s IRS cybersecurity and infrastructure capability would be to a successful delivery, the IRS project management office contracted directly with STP to obtain its unique subject matter expertise.

Challenge

Unfortunately for the IRS, it was given little time to stand up a system projected to process over 200 million records a year. Its budgets were also constrained as the nation was continuing to recover from the Great Recession. STP needed an approach to provide the IRS with a large team of experts for a fraction of the cost of doing so.

Services

The Solution

STP staffed 5 full time positions with experts in hardware, networking, automation, systems integration, and application architecture. STP used a sixth position to reach back into its organization to utilize 16 other SME’s on an as needed basis. By following this method, STP was able to provide the expertise of 21 industry professionals to the effort for the price of just six. With help from STP’s SME’s, the IRS was able to successfully deliver the AIR system that processed electronic submissions from 51 exchanges, 4,300 issuers of insurance, and 300,000 employers submitting more than 275 million records.