EIV keeps data secure but accessible

One of the challenges Housing and Urban Development Department officials faced in developing a federal income verification system was that each state kept its own wage data and used its own data transfer protocol, making it difficult to access data across the enterprise.So when HUD project manager David Sandler and Nicole Faison, director of HUD’s Office of Public Housing, led the team that developed the Enterprise Income Verification System, they made sure that it would use Web-based technology that could be easily accessed across multiple platforms.EIV uses Extensible Markup Language and Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology, and its business logic tier uses Java.Users access EIV securely through a single sign-on; HUD’s Web Access Security System provides security and authentication services for EIV; and WASS also provides a common ID with which HUD users can access several other HUD systems. All public access to EIV is secured via Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.EIV’s Java code libraries are an implementation of one of the Office of Management and Budget’s designated architectures that are to be implemented governmentwide, and are available for use by other agencies.Although EIV was developed for HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing, it also started being used by HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing in March.EIV’s technology could be useful to many government projects, Faison said. “This is a system that can be replicated in other agencies” that rely on income information to determine need for financial assistance such as food stamps, Faison said.