7th Annual 2001 - 2002 Best Practices Award Winners

TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION
Department of Taxation and Finance
Image Archive and Retrieval System

Information Technology Solution

The Department of Taxation & Finance (DTF) has developed their own information technology solution to archive, stage and display tax return images to streamline several of the processes related to processing tax returns and responding to customer inquiries. These tax return images are used in various ways and are accessible by all authorized Department personnel through the Department's intranet site. The image viewer is a multi-tiered application designed and written by DTF's IT staff featuring a JAVA based viewer which communicates with servers on both an IBM mainframe and an IBM RS6000 through the use of MQ-series calls routed through CICS.

This complete solution was designed and built by the Department's IT staff. It provides access to over 400,000,000 tax return images which have been archived since the Department began receiving tax return images as a part of the PIT2000 project beginning in 1996. This system has now evolved to handle over 100,000,000 tax return images each year including personal income tax returns; withholding tax and wage reporting returns; corporation tax payment coupons; sales tax returns and attachments; estimated tax payment documents; estate tax returns and attachments; accounts receivable payment documents and related correspondence; and highway use tax information. These returns are scanned by the banks who have contracted to receive tax returns on behalf of the Department.

The images are archived to magnetic disk for the first year and then migrated to optical disk for longer term storage. The images are accessible by several different keys including the application type, the processing year and the document control number. Access is also provided by the taxpayers federal ein or social security number. Authorized users can also include selection criteria to return only the form types they wish to view. The JAVA viewer also provides the ability to set preferences or options to select whichever images are required, establish the order the images should be returned in and set default parameters for continued viewing. Zoom parameters can be set, images can be magnified or rotated and a flying magnifier can zero in on an area of special interest. Annotations can be made to the images which are stored in a database and available to anyone who views the document set.

DTF applications send automated requests to the image retrieval system to stage images for viewing. These applications attempt to anticipate the need for immediate viewing response for such business functions as return exception correction, protest resolution and audit program screening. Staging of tax return images is also done in anticipation of taxpayer calls and correspondence. For example, each time a notice is sent to a taxpayer or a tax return refund is reduced due to taxpayer error, the corresponding tax return images are staged to facilitate the customer representatives response to the taxpayer on the telephone. The imaging application has enabled the phone reps to respond to the taxpayer when they call, not within days of the first contact. The paper based system requires a formal request for paper copies of returns from storage which could take days to receive and required tracking systems to be put in place to acknowledge receipt of documents. Several people can now view the tax return at the same time instead of waiting for its return to the Records Management Center for redistribution.

System Design Components

The system was designed around IBM hardware components. An RS6000 hardware platform running under an AIX operating system, Tivoli Storage Management and DB2 universal database management system manages over 36 terabytes of image files which have been archived starting in 1996. IBM's ESS direct access storage devices, IBM optical jukeboxes and tapes are used to store and backup the images.

Images are archived to magnetic disk for the first year then migrated to optical disk for longer term storage. Images are viewed from separate DB2 databases for improved performance. Up to 50 million images are available for viewing at any one time. Images which have not been staged can be requested online and staged within the hour for user access.

Initial processing by either Fleet Bank or JP Morgan Chase Bank creates the tiff image files for each document. The tiff image files images along with corresponding control records are sent to the Department daily. The control records are used to facilitate integrity checking. A tax image control system was created to ensure that each document which was scanned at the bank has been received by the Department. An archiving process was designed to match these control records to the appropriate image files, and archive all matched sets. Processes were also developed to recycle both the control records and orphaned images from previous runs with new batches to ensure that nothing is lost and everything is eventually balanced and archived. A separate cross checking control process was established to verify that the applications had received data related to each tax return images and that the images had been successfully archived. The control system will also determine whether or not a specific tax return document(s) should be staged or cached and for how long. A comprehensive record of each image file received is stored separate databases on the RS6000 and in a mainframe DB2 database to monitor the integrity of the system, provide redundancy and provide access to the documents.

Contact:

Joel Schensul
Department of Taxation and Finance
State Office Campus
Bldg. 8
Albany, NY 12227
(518) 457-4362
joel_schensul@tax.state.ny.us