Retiring CIO Looks Back at Department's Wins

Nabil Fares, CIO of the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, will retire from state service at the end of the year. Before leaving, he reflected on some of his department's accomplishments during his tenure.

By April, when Fares left his position as Stockton CIO and IT director and joined the state agency, it had created an excise tax for the sale of recreational adult-use marijuana and a cultivation tax on harvested marijuana, bringing in revenue from the commercial market.

The Centralized Revenue Opportunity System (CROS) completed its second rollout in May 2018. The rollout included implementation for:

• Sales and Use Tax
• Cigarette Retailer License Fee
• Covered Electronic Waste Recycling Fee
• Lumber Products Assessment
• Cigarette and Tobacco Internet Purchases
• California Tire Fee
• Prepaid Mobile Telephony Service Surcharge programs

The entire program will replace the Integrated Revenue Information System (IRIS) and the Automated Compliance Management System (ACMS). The system will also create an enterprise data warehouse, integrating and automating tax collection, account management and data retrieval technologies.

Two more rollouts are scheduled to be completed by 2020.

The Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Case Management System was completed in October. The system streamlined the processing and management of cases. It also tracks data metrics and record storage.

At the end of January, the department automated the daily transmission of DMV tax allocation data, Fares' second DMV project in his career. 

Fares mirrored his work at Stockton by completing an email migration at CDTFA of 5,000 users.

Before going to Stockton in January 2015, Fares was director and CIO of the California Department of Public Health for seven years and, previously, chief of Criminal Justice IT Enterprise Development for the California Department of Justice.