Treasury’s FMS cashes in on Pay.gov portal

In less than a year since launching its Pay.gov portal, the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service has collected $1 billion in fees, fines, leases, taxes and other electronic payments from citizens and businesses through the site.The portal operates 24 hours a day and accepts payments for 340 agencies. Users complete Web forms, then direct the payments electronically from their bank accounts.Transactions that used to require trips to agency offices, extensive paperwork, lockboxes and bank automated clearinghouse systems are now entirely paperless, said Brett Smith, FMS’ acting director of applied technology.“It starts digital and ends digital,” Smith said. FMS converts agencies’ paper forms into Extensible Markup Language and Hypertext Markup Language for Web use. And Pay.gov absorbs all costs directly tied to each agency’s collection processes.FMS built the portal with the capacity to handle 80 million transactions totaling $125 billion a year. Written in Java, the site’s application prevents duplicate payments, lets agency financial officials link to other agencies’ systems and turns all the records into computer In less than a year since launching its Pay.gov portal, the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service has collected $1 billion in fees, fines, leases, taxes and other electronic payments from citizens and businesses throughout the site.The portal operates 24 hours a day and accepts payments for 340 agencies. Users complete Web forms, then direct the payments electronically from their bank accounts.Transactions that used to require trips to agency offices, extensive paperwork, lockboxes and bank automated clearinghouse systems are now entirely paperless, said Brett Smith, FMS’ acting director of applied technology.“It starts digital and ends digital,” Smith said. FMS converts agencies’ paper forms into Extensible Markup Language and Hypertext Markup Language for Web use. And Pay.gov absorbs all costs directly tied to each agency’s collection processes.FMS built the portal with the capacity to handle 80 million transactions totaling $125 billion a year. Written in Java, the site’s application prevents duplicate payments, lets agency financial officials link to other agencies’ systems and turns all the records into computer files, Smith said.