IRS finished ObamaCare prep at the buzzer

The IRS didn’t give a final test to its ObamaCare systems until less than a week before this year’s filing season kicked off, a federal watchdog said Thursday. 

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration found that the team that tests IRS systems didn’t access the Affordable Care Act system before they started their work in November 2014.

{mosads}The Final Integration Test (FIT) team is charged with ensuring that all the various IRS systems can coexist during the filing season. It then got eight separate versions of ObamaCare applications between November and Jan. 15, 2015 — five days before the filing season opened.

The Treasury inspector general said the delays in getting the ACA systems to the FIT team pushed back needed tests of the programs, which increased “the risk of filing season processing errors that would have been identified and corrected.”

On top of that, IRS inspectors were forced to seek the highest priority assistance to deal with problems with the electronic filing system.

Despite those issues, the watchdog expressed concern that the IRS wasn’t taking the problems seriously enough.

John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner, has said that the agency largely met the challenges of ObamaCare’s first filing season. The agency said in response to the new audit that it had “made considerable progress” in testing, and had adequate procedures in place.