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TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION
Department of Taxation & Finance
FedState 1120 Project

The FedState 1120 project, also known as Corporation Tax e-file, was developed in conjunction with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the States that participated in the Tax Implementation Group for Electronic Requirements Standardization (TIGERS).

In implementing the project:

• the TIGERS group developed a master XML schema that participating States used to transfer data from software vendors, through the IRS Master e-file Gateway to the States' client server;
• the IRS developed the host web services to communicate between the software vendor that submitted the data and the States that collected the data;
• each participating State developed the client portion of the web services to electronically collect the Corporation Tax data and payments and the interfaces needed to back-end systems to process the XML data.

The FedState 1120 project introduced a new architecture in data collection to the IRS, using application-to-application (A2A) communication over secure web services to transmit the data and send the acknowledgments, and an XML schema to define the data and payment information.

Implementation of the FedState 1120 project by the Department of Taxation and Finance (DTF) included six different prototypes for each of the key new technologies introduced in the project. These prototypes ranged from:

• a web services prototype to prove communication with the new IRS Master e-file Gateway. These services provided automated application-to-application (A2A) data collection, receipt and acknowledgments;
• a DB2 version 9 (Viper) database prototype to prove storage and retrieval of native XML data. The Viper database worked flawlessly in this prototype, even though the product was in Beta when the project began. The XML data storage capability allowed indexing of XML data elements and offers the capability to query both relational and XML columns using XQuery;
• a Websphere Integration Developer (WID) prototype to prove mapping of the XML input data to a flat file for use in back-end legacy systems for processing. Using WID, over 2000 data elements were mapped with only 6 errors found in the first output run, translating to an accuracy rate of 99.4%;
• a Workplace Forms prototype to prove the display of the State XML data from the Viper database to an image that mirrors the paper form in a browser window. Workplace Forms provided a way to map the XML data received to templates that closely resemble the paper form staff are used to viewing for paper data submissions;
• a stylesheet prototype to prove the display the Federal XML data from the Viper database to a browser window. The IRS supplied the stylesheets and these were mapped the XML data stored in the Viper database;
• a Websphere Process Server (WPS) prototype that used a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to define the process of collecting the data from the IRS through the mapping of the XML data in WID to the writing of the flat file and transfer of the file to the back-end legacy system for processing. Using WPS for the BPEL proved extremely useful to the process, and allows modification of the process without opening up application code.

Each of these prototypes used software or techniques that were not previously used in Production at DTF. Using these prototypes proved extremely successful, as it allowed the technical staff to develop solutions for issues uncovered at the prototype stage, and eliminated the developers from the delays normally found in attempting to use new tools or techniques. This allowed the project to be developed in a six-month time period and brought up on-time.

The successful implementation of the FedState project provided DTF with a solid foundation for using these new tools and techniques as we develop the next release of eMPIRE, Release 3, which will use WPS for processing Personal Income Tax returns, WID to map the flat file input to XML data, Viper to store the returns and Workplace Forms to display the XML data.

Contact:

Gary Kuchark

Director, Infrastructure Bureau

NYS Department of Taxation & Finance

W.A. Harriman State Office Building Campus

Building 8, Room 753

Albany, NY

(518) 457-6728

gary_kuchark@tax.state.ny.us