IRS, Education to team up on electronic student aid form
The IRS and Education Department will release a new student aid form in January that is shorter and easier to complete, federal CIO Vivek Kundra says.
The Internal Revenue Service and the Education Department plan to introduce a new electronic application for student aid that is much shorter and simpler than today’s form, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a Senate task force today.
Kundra, and Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, testified before the Senate Budget Committee’s Government Performance Task Force.
The task force’s chairman, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) asked the two technology leaders if there have been any “early wins” regarding improving programs.
Kundra said the IRS and Education officials collaborated on improving the student aid form.
The current form forces students to input pages of repetitive data that the IRS already has, Kundra said.
“With the new approach, the two agencies got together and now an individual[s] will get their own tax data with one click,” Kundra said. “They’re going to be eliminating over 20 Web screens that used to have to be filled out.”
The current student aid form is more difficult to fill out than the IRS 1040 tax form, Kundra said.
Other agencies are working on similar information sharing projects, he said.
NEXT STORY: DOE uses cloud computing for science, CIO says