Case USA35: How a State Tax Agency Branded Form Digitization as Enterprise Architecture Reform

Sunil Dutt Jha
Jul 31
1 min read

Updated: Oct 22

Overview

This case is part of a 100-diagnostic series exposing how US public agencies have mislabeled front-end improvements as “Enterprise Architecture progress.” In state tax systems, a recurring pattern is equating online form digitization with enterprise reform.

Citizens could now submit returns online, upload documents, and receive automated acknowledgments — yet the enterprise structure linking policy updates, compliance checks, dispute resolution, and inter-agency data sharing was never modeled.

P1–P6 Insight Preview: Digitization improved user-facing processes (P2) and component access (P4), but lacked strategy-to-policy alignment (P1) and coordinated system behavior (P3). Business operations (P6) still relied on manual reviews for complex cases; tech operations (P6) maintained multiple unintegrated verification engines.

Role Disconnects:

CEO/Commissioner: “Our taxpayers can now file online” — but core adjudication processes are unchanged.
CIO: “The platform accepts every form” — yet cross-agency compliance workflows are missing.
Sales Head (Public Outreach): “Digital filing improves satisfaction” — but disputes still take months.
Chief EA: “We digitized forms, not the enterprise structure.”
Head of Tax Processing: “We can receive returns instantly, but we still pass paper for most of the exceptions.”