Executive Summary
The Pennsylvania Treasury Department (Treasury) is an independent agency led by an elected State
Treasurer. The department processes about 30 million payments totaling $130 billion annually, as well as
invests and manages more than 200 funds on behalf of the Commonwealth, and acts as the state’s bank by
safeguarding and investing taxpayers’ public funds.
Established in 1929, the Pennsylvania Board of Finance and Revenue (BF&R) is an independent
adjudicatory body responsible for ensuring fair, timely, and impartial resolution of tax appeals across the
Commonwealth. Chaired by the State Treasurer and supported by two Governor-appointed members, the
board provides taxpayers with a critical second level of review for approximately 2,500 cases per year valued
more than a billion dollars, beyond the Department of Revenue (DOR). This work requires the BF&R team to
work closely with Treasury and DOR to support businesses, citizens, and their tax representatives, as well as
lawyers in the private sector.
Until recently, BF&R depended on a decade-old SharePoint system riddled with governance gaps, manual
touchpoints, and security vulnerabilities. In 2025, Act 123 of 2024, a new pro-taxpayer law strongly supported
by Treasurer Stacy Garrity, went into effect on January 27, 2025, allowing taxpayers filing appeals to also
request a mediated settlement at no extra cost. To meet the new requirement and modernize the BF&R
business processes to improve governance and transparency, Treasury launched the BF&R Modernization
Project. The result is a four-component ecosystem comprised of a public-facing taxpayer portal, an
administrative website, an automated data integration pipeline, and an OnBase Workflow/WorkView case
management application that processes, tracks, and resolves tax appeal petitions.
Launched in January 2025, the new system delivered automated petition intake, case management, brief
and order generation, and public portal integration. The early results – over 5,000 automated emails sent
without human intervention, 43,000+ documents managed with full audit trails, 10,000 automatic status
updates transmitted to the Department of Revenue’s RAPS system, and approximately 90% reduction in
manual drafting errors – are striking. The next phase of the system roadmap extends the platform with AIpowered full-text search of data spanning five decades using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and
automated PII redaction, positioning Pennsylvania as a national model for governed, compliant, citizen-facing
administrative modernization.
