MONTGOMERY – The Alabama Department of Revenue (ALDOR) is honored to receive a 2024 Innovation and Excellence in Tax Administration Award from the Federation of Tax Administrators (FTA) for ALDOR’s Barcode Tax App.

Members of the ALDOR team received the award during a ceremony at the FTA Annual Conference in June in Long Beach, California. The decision was based upon criteria that included innovatively solving a problem and effectively measuring results.

“The ALDOR team continues to amaze me with their dedication and innovation,” said Revenue Commissioner Vernon Barnett. “Our priority continues to be serving Alabama taxpayers as fairly, efficiently, and securely as possible, and the Barcode Tax App is another effective tool that helps us do that. Many thanks to the FTA for this honor and recognition.”

Each year, ALDOR tests tax forms offered by tax software providers for content and accuracy before the forms are pushed out for taxpayers’ and tax preparers’ use. These forms have bar codes on them

that, when scanned, provide ALDOR with the information that has been entered on the form by the user. ALDOR gives hypothetical scenarios to the software providers, who then submit the forms to ALDOR with those scenarios. When ALDOR scans the bar codes, the information retrieved should match those scenarios.

The new Barcode Tax App has offered some automation to this process that has significantly reduced the time it takes to review each form. Previously, ALDOR staffers had to scan each form by hand individually, then review the data and manually type all of the errors in a list for the software providers to correct. Now, the forms are automatically uploaded into the app and scanned, and the lists of errors are compiled automatically by the app. Each form could require up to several days of review before, but now each review can be done in minutes.