HERNDON, Va., Nov. 23, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) recently reached a major milestone with processing their one-billionth form on the Service Center Recognition Image Processing System (SCRIPS). The IRS utilizes the Northrop Grumman-developed system in the processing of three families of IRS forms including Schedule K-1 Forms, Information Return Processing Forms, and Federal Tax Deposit Coupons via high speed scanning.
SCRIPS provides a data capture, management and storage system, supported by Northrop Grumman's Information Technology (IT) sector.
"SCRIPS continues to provide highly efficient tax form processing for the IRS," said Wood Parker, president of the sector's Federal Enterprise Solutions business unit. "One billion forms processed represent more than 100 million forms on average per year, one of the largest imaging and optical character recognition (OCR) systems in operation."
In addition, the IRS has recently awarded Northrop Grumman IT a development task order to process Form 941 (used by employers to file their quarterly tax returns) on SCRIPS. This development task order will include processing approximately 19 million paper submissions a year, starting mid-2005.
The original SCRIPS contract was awarded to Northrop Grumman IT in 1993. After testing, training and the establishment of a support infrastructure, the system went into production in 1995 at five IRS service centers. SCRIPS was the first imaging and OCR capability deployed by the IRS.
Northrop Grumman IT is in their second option year of a ten-year contract awarded in November 2002 to continue to provide IT maintenance, program changes, technology enhancements, and new application implementation for SCRIPS. SCRIPS was further enhanced this year with the infusion of a 2D barcode-technology capability.
SCRIPS has demonstrated its ability to process more than one million forms at just one IRS location within a five-day period. In addition to processing large volumes, SCRIPS also reduces the amount of errors that occur with traditional manual data-entry systems, thereby reducing the IRS rework, and helping to improve the quality of service to the taxpayer.