Client
One of the top debt relief programs in the US from California.
The Challenge
The company came to us with a certain challenge: to automate the process of pulling data from the IRS and filing tax returns.
Those two processes are very labor-intensive: on average, pulling information for one client from the IRS takes about 45 minutes. The same goes for filling the tax return – it takes around 45 minutes as well.
There is also only one set of credentials for going on the IRS website so multiple people could not do this at the same time.
The coronavirus had a negative impact on how the IRS works and greatly increased their workload in general.
The IRS was backed up and a large number of cases were not being processed on time because the information was not available yet.
COVID-19 has also greatly impacted our Client’s operations – due to the general lockdown imposed in the state of California Company’s employees were not able to work for a while as they were told to stay at home.
Another problem was how to automate the two-factor authentication that was needed to access the IRS website.
The Solution
We set up a network of robots for this company. The robots work together and signal the other robots for work later on. Two of the robots are important to mention here:
Robot 1 would visit the IRS website, pull tax documents for a client, scrape the information for the documents, and send the information to Robot 2.
The second robot would automatically file tax returns for the Company’s Clients based on the data pulled by Robot 1 using intuit.
We have also overcome the challenge of two-factor authentication: The robot would log into a cell phone using VPN and scrape the authentication code that was generated every 30 seconds.
The Outcome
Due to the unique situation where the company was limited in working for weeks and the IRS website was not responding we had a chance to perform over 1500 cases of pulling the data from the IRS.
Robot 1 completed 1657 cases. One case on average took 6 minutes and 28 seconds. The process ran for a little over a week.
We saved roughly 38.5 minutes for every case, which translates to 1063 hours of manual labor saved in a week!
Robot 2 completed 2600 cases (every case from Robot 1 produced variable cases for Robot 2).
The average time to fill in the tax return on behalf of the Client was 4:25.
In this instance, we saved 40.5 minutes per each case, which translates to a total amount of 1755 hours!. Robot 2 was run on two computers at the same time and was done parallelly to Robot 1.
In total, these two robots saved 2818 hours in manual labor in one week.
This is 70.5 weeks of full-time work for one employee who doesn’t use the phone, doesn’t go to the bathroom, doesn’t go on breaks, doesn’t eat lunch, doesn’t get sick, and doesn’t go on vacation.
This translates to over $100,000 in savings when taking into account the median salary in California and employee costs.
