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A complete list of the companies -- which includes top federal contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman -- has been posted online.
The companies each were awarded a one-year contract with nine one-year renewal options through the IRS's Total Information Processing Support Services-4 (TIPSS-4) program.
On the list with the usual suspects -- which in addition to Lockheed and Northrop include AT&T, Booz Allen, CSC, and IBM -- the IRS awarded eight small businesses TIPSS4 contracts. Small businesses have long griped they have been left out of the bidding process for federal IT procurements, a scenario the government has been working to change.
Among small businesses that will be working with the IRS through the TIPSS-4 awards are Citizant, an IT services provider that serves both military and civilian agencies; CSSS.Net, which specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions: and InSysCo, which provides systems integration and IT consulting.
The IRS TIPSS-4 is the agency's contract vehicle for a range of services to support its myriad legacy tax systems. The agency is currently in the middle of an ambitious and challenging multibillion-dollar effort to upgrade its IT systems that began in 1999.
Services the firms are contracted to provide under TIPSS-4 include: design, development, deployment, operations, and maintenance of IRS IT systems; cybersecurity, including risk analysis, new procedures, and changes to existing systems; project management and tools for managing, tracking, reporting, and transitioning large-scale systems; and configuration management, according to the IRS.
