Leadership: California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) Director Nicolas Maduros is the department’s inaugural director, appointed in July 2017 by Gov. Jerry Brown and reappointed in June 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Maduros was chief of staff at the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2014-2017 and was president at Delta Policy Group from 2010 to 2014. He has a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, where he was cum laude, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, where he was magna cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. CDTFA’s chief information officer is Scott Capulong, a 25-year staffer who was elevated to that role April 23, 2019. Capulong first joined the agency’s precursor, the State Board of Equalization, in 1995 in Orange County, moving to Sacramento in 1998 to join its Technology Services Division and becoming part of leadership in 2015. “The role of the CIO has moved from being primarily technical to one that requires an understanding of the business requirements of the department and prioritizes our customer needs,” Capulong told Industry Insider in 2021 in a One-on-One interview, adding: “Therefore, we are constantly adapting to meet their needs and developing forward-looking technology solutions.”
Budget: $731.4 million according to the enacted 2023-2024 Fiscal Year state budget, an increase of 2.9 percent from $711 million in FY 2022-23. (All numbers are rounded.)
Total staff: Approximately 3,700 employees, nearly 300 of whom are in CDTFA’s Technology Services Department. The department is approved for 4,556 positions in the FY 2023-24 budget, up from 4,554 in FY 2022-23.
CDTFA debuted July 1, 2017, following the signing of the Taxpayer Transparency and Fairness Act of 2017 by Brown. It redistributed the operations of the State Board of Equalization (BOE) — creating CDTFA to administer state sales and use, fuel, tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis taxes, and other taxes and fees that fund specific state programs; the Office of Tax Appeals to give taxpayers a fair, objective and timely appeals process; and with the Board continuing as an independent agency administering property, alcoholic beverage and insurance taxes.
The Board and the Office are independent entities; CDTFA is under the umbrella California Government Operations Agency (GovOps). The new department’s aim, then-GovOps Secretary Marybel Batjer said in 2017, was “fair and equal tax administration in our state” and upholding the California Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, which became law in 1988.
A key technology accomplishment for the department has been the multiphase Centralized Revenue Opportunity System (CROS), which began in October 2016 under BOE and wrapped Aug. 16, 2021, when CDTFA signed a “final state acceptance” letter. It consolidated “multiple legacy information technology systems and created a responsive online filing and payment system for California business owners,” the department told Industry Insider — California via email, and enabled taxpayers to do things like register new locations, seek relief or extensions, track correspondence and see real-time account information. CDTFA partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and FAST Enterprises to migrate CROS from the California Department of Technology (CDT) data center to the AWS cloud platform, which “improved process efficiencies, increased the performance of the department’s mission-critical tax application, and decreased costs,” CDTFA said. In March 2021, CDTFA’s Valerie Williams, CROS project director, won a CIO Academy Award at the California Virtual Public Sector CIO Academy.*
CDTFA’s MyCDTFA Team Member Dashboard won a Best Workforce Initiative in 2022 at the California Digital Government Summit’s* “Best of California” Award Ceremony. The dashboard, which is centrally located, streamlines workflows and boosts efficiency by offering team members a one-stop shop to review pending organizational tasks such as upcoming training dates, timesheet submission due dates, and internal forms. Longtime CDTFA executive Chuck Harris, chief of its Application and Data Services Branch, accepted the award and said in November that the dashboard “worked so well, we are meeting with other departments that are interested in the system.”
In 2021, CDTFA’s Data Visualization Tool won the Award for Best Practices in Tax Administration from the Federation of Tax Administrators. The tool, the department said, shows its “commitment to transparency and utilizing new technology to better serve taxpayers, [and] provides on-demand information to the public in an interactive and easy-to-understand format.” Initially created for internal use, the tool’s popularity led to its public availability. The project began in late 2019 and was made available to the public in early 2020. It was built in-house with Microsoft Power BI, which integrated with existing CDTFA software.
During the past three years, CDTFA has also implemented:
- A Multifunction Printer Service (MPS), in January, that lets team members send printing requests from any location, including when they’re working remote. Documents can be retrieved with the swipe of an employee badge, and the new solution has improved security and reduced printing costs.
- An in-house timekeeping app that lets team members submit and approve absence requests, and prepare and process timesheets.
- A new digital signature process for many taxpayer forms. It smooths the document signing process, has enhanced security, and enables near-instant form submission.
- An update of the department’s public website, adding live chat and chatbot features with quick, easy-to-access answers to common questions. The tools typically handle 500 to 600 inquiries a day.
- His largest upcoming project, Harris told Industry Insider, is the migration to new enterprise content management platforms, which should occupy staff through 2023. The department said it has recently begun migrating most on-prem content into Box, including “operational content stored on CDTFA-hosted file shares, as well as documents stored in Documentum,” and affirmed the migration should wrap by year’s end.
- In June, CDTFA, working with CDT, released a solicitation seeking a “scalable and reliable tax return analysis solution with data analytics,” one capable of using machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy and efficiency of tax return processing, and “provide timely tax compliance advice and actions to better serve the taxpayers.” Called the Data Analytics and Tax Return Processing Solution (DATRPS), the solicitation is challenge-based and a phased approach with several bidder submissions and evaluations, starting with a proof of concept.
- CDTFA is also evaluating using generative AI to improve its operational efficiencies. It has amassed a notable amount of data, which it said is “an asset when fully utilized,” offering as an example using AI initially to identify patterns in the data — freeing up staff for “critical decision-making.”
*Both events are hosted by Government Technology magazine, Industry Insider — California’s sister publication.
