IE11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

For Tax Agency, an Outage — and an Upgrade

The state's tax administration department was already planning a system upgrade when the April 30 outage took place.

The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration's Centralized Revenue Opportunity System will replace the department's legacy systems, beginning May 7.

The new system, CROS, will provide "an innovative, customer-centric solution" according to Paul Cambra, CDTFA public information officer.

While offering more online services with a better user experience, it will also streamline business processes and improve data analytics for the information already collected.

The state contracted with Fast Enterprises to use GenTax software for the new system at a price of $85.1 million. It is estimated the system will create $335 million in revenue over six years. The off-the-shelf software is used by more than 25 tax agencies across the country.

In order to prepare for the move to the new system, staff have been trained and maintenance was scheduled May 1 to May 6.

Prior to the scheduled maintenance, the system experienced degradation from a high traffic volume. Once system timeouts began, the department's IT staff began responding and posted a notice that taxpayers would have through May 1 to file. The outage lasted 150 minutes.

“To ensure this type of situation does not occur in the future, CDTFA is reviewing its current website hosting infrastructure and monitoring systems, and enhancing them to provide a more robust technical architecture, granular fault detection, and expanded alerting functionality,” said CDTFA’s CIO Nabil Fares.

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.