Federal Agency Spotlight – The Internal Revenue Service

Federal Agency Spotlight – The Internal Revenue Service’s Risk Awareness Month 2024

Risk awareness enhances decision-making, promotes safety, and ultimately safeguards resources and well-being. Understanding risks not only helps in navigating challenges but also seizes opportunities for growth and innovation. It is important for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to have a robust risk-aware culture that encourages employees and managers to identify and mitigate risks while doing their work before those risks escalate into an issue or crisis.

Each year, the IRS conducts a risk awareness campaign that emphasizes the importance of identifying and managing potential risks and provides information on the various channels for reporting risks. A risk-aware culture encourages open communication and collaboration that drives organizational resilience through risk-based decision making and provides opportunities to support the IRS mission, goals, and objectives.

The IRS’s Chief Risk Officer, Mike Wetklow, kicked off the IRS Risk Awareness Month on November 4 with the theme: Forward Focus: Empowerment through Risk Management. In a message to all employees, Mike encouraged everyone to be proactive and strengthen their knowledge about risk management.

The IRS Office of the Chief Risk Officer was featured in an awareness event and issued several internal messages for Risk Awareness Month. A “Workday Snapshot” event with Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) staff explored their career paths, what they do at the IRS and how they operate in the IRS organization. Throughout the month, the IRS also issued messages to promote a strong risk culture empowering employees to identify risks and encouraging leaders to adopt risk-based decision-making approaches to minimize risks and maximize opportunities.

During Government Risk Awareness Week, the IRS participated in the 17th Annual Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management Summit in Washington, DC. The IRS ERM Director discussed a COVID-19 case study, sharing lessons learned and possible risk management approaches for emerging risks. In addition, the IRS Director of Data Products and Insights within Research, Applied Analytics and Statistics joined in a panel discussion about a framework for managing risk related to artificial intelligence. The goal of the framework is to provide guidance on identifying, assessing, and mitigating risk associated with the use of artificial intelligence technologies.

The IRS will close out the agency’s campaign with a message recapping the month’s activities and providing links to access all materials shared during the campaign. Employees will also be able to test their understanding of enterprise risk management by taking a Risk Knowledge Check on the IRS intranet.

In summary, the goal of IRS Risk Awareness Month is to broaden everyone’s understanding of the range of risk management activities taking place at the IRS and to incorporate risk management into everything we do. When our employees and managers can identify potential threats and make informed decisions, it strengthens our operations, promotes transparency and accountability, and improves our ability to serve taxpayers.