IRS Makes Real Property Management Less Taxing

A move to automated documentation of real property has made it easier for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to manage over 30 million square feet of agency assets.

Kathleen Foy, a policy analyst with the IRS Real Estate and Facilities Management group (REFM), explained the project during the Archibus Federal Real Property Management Survival Workshop, held on June 27, 2007 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.

According to Foy, the IRS employs between 100,000 and 125,000 workers (the number increases at peak times of the year), and manages more than 30 million square feet of real property, with more than 750 buildings worldwide. The organization’s annual real property budget exceeds $1 billion, including management and maintenance.

The IRS has 14 business units. REFM is charged by GSA and OMB with reporting the square footage occupancy cost – down to parking spaces, workstation utilization, and vacant workstations – for all these units.

Creating an integrated Information Technology (IT) system for real property assets was essential in getting control of spending at the IRS, said Foy. Important agency-wide financial and operational decisions were being made without input from REFM. Consequently, Foy said, the group had to react to things that “didn’t make sense.”

“We were maintaining call centers in Manhattan at $300 per square foot as opposed to a cornfield in Oklahoma at a dollar-fifty per square foot,” she said.

To resolve the insufficient communication at the administrative level of IRS, Foy’s group embarked on a plan to implement an asset management model that would manage the interdependencies and needs of all IRS assets. That required the creation of a more direct line of responsibilities, down to the office level, and the development of an overarching strategy for managing and working IT.

Phase 1 of the IT strategy was development of a baseline transition architecture to improve data, portfolio and project management. Phase 2 was the development of target architecture for total real property asset management, including integration with the agency’s enterprise resource planning systems and retirement of legacy systems.

The new architecture enables IRS to monitor such variables as true utilization rate, vacancy rate, churn, rent attribution and performance metrics, Foy said. REFM has access to empirical data and tailored reports can be developed around the variables.

This information gives REFM much better and clearer insight into the status of IRS’s real property assets. Foy noted that if the IRS had this information two years earlier, “we would have been able to respond much more quickly to the Gulf Coast Hurricane.”