Journey Mapping

A very recent visit to the IRS at the JFK building, Boston, lead me to thinking this would be wonderful opportunity to try my hand at Journey Mapping. I first read of this tool from “Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking toolkit for Managers“. (Buy this here)

I was fascinated because the tool provides a powerful shift to focus from “Why are we creating something here?” to “What is the customer trying to do”? I was even more attracted to the fact that this makes the customer a human, and his or her emotions that play an important part to why he or she does things the way she does. We exist in a world where technology is habit forming, customer engagement is viewed as a way to collect, mine and process data , in order that behavior can be affected, Journey mapping proves to be an effective tool to charter into emotions of a user.

Context: Customers who will need to be filing Form 1040C to request Sailing or Departure Permit from IRS as a part of their relocation outside of the US

When I first heard of this permit, I had no idea. I called up a couple of friends who I knew had migrated back to India. This was very small sample, to be frank. However, none of them had heard such a permit existed. I for one, was not aware, until a friend had mentioned to me about it. With the recent emergence of stricter immigration laws in the United States, the recent political changes and Trump’s executive orders attempting to reduce legal immigration, it has been cited on a recent report, that speak of the barrage of new and unprecedented application requirements, as well as reports of administration plans to further limit the visas. I speak from experience of having filed this form, especially as I prepared my move back to my home country and believe this is an important “to-do” item for most folks who plan for relocation outside of the United States.

However, not to digress from the topic of using the Journey Mapping Tool for the context of the filing of form 1040C, let me just say, the whole procedure, that I underwent, definitely had me on my toes for a period of a week or two.

“Before leaving the United States, all aliens (except those listed below under Aliens Not Required To Obtain Sailing or Departure Permits) must obtain a certificate of compliance. This document, also popularly known as the sailing permit or departure permit, must be secured from the IRS before leaving the U.S. “

Now to begin with.

Consider the experience of an individual who has to file for a 1040-C, imagine a salaried employee relocating out of the United States, for personal or professional reasons, perhaps with or without dependents. He or she has been working hard towards gearing up for this relocation, and exhausted after months of preparations going into all of the different facets of a move such as packing, shipments, changes to legal documents because of the address change, etc, to name a few and is also traumatized by the overwhelming change that is about to hit him or her. Having him or her , now take up this additional responsibility to furnish the IRS the details of taxes, a no brainer, to qualify as a mentally exhausting task.

At this junction, a hypothetical view for the tasks is envisioned as shown below

To speak of the steps,

1. An individual (with or without family and dependents) is preparing on the relocation.

2. He or she first needs to fix the IRS appointment, and at this junction, the search happens , to find the closest local IRS office. In the case that there exists no local IRS office, there needs to additional planning required for travel to the IRS office location.

3. The appointments are not available online and these cannot be booked through the web. The individual filing for the appointment, is required to call the IRS customer service for appointments. There is a wait time and the user is guided by an customer engagement executive who helps to fix the appointment, and usually this procedure is completed with providing the individual a confirmation number. Again, the painful part of this procedure is that there may be no availability of appointments, closer to the date the individual may require, and it is not always available for an individual to plan for travel, unless he or she has the appointment for sure.

4. The forms required for certification of Tax compliancy are either a 2063 or a 1040-C. An individual may not possess sufficient income or residency for tax purposes and this may be required to file 2063, but if otherwise, the form required is 1040-C. This is an easy and straight forward decision making.

5. The next step, gathering of all of the paper work, is a pain point, simply because of the tedious amount of steps involved in making sure that the individual has gathered all of needed information required to make a tax calculation. These are bound to be time consuming especially for an individual who has dependents, and owns more more assets and liabilities. Since there isn’t a single source platform to obtain the different sets of information, an individual is left to scramble for order while making sure none of the relevant information is left behind. These are important for the next step to ensure a rough estimation is prepared in order that individual plan for tax returns the following year.

6. Calculation is straight forward for an individual with fewer assets. However, that still requires few hours of time. I waded through a year of my pay subs, (I was paid biweekly) and I find that while I understood how my returns would be calculated, the pain points lay because of having to transfer the data onto a spreadsheet. Individuals may be required to work with tax consultants especially for this submitting itemized deductions and thus spend a substantial fee, to prepare estimates. HR block provides service on an hourly basis and I paid a minimum of 50$ for simply validating my calculation.

7. These calculations clearly hold an emotional low for when one discovers he or she may owe IRS more money. Who does want to pay more taxes? (In my case, it helped me to simulate an environment to plan to letting go of my existing company shares in order that I also plan for tax because of the increased income I would receive.

8. If the estimates indicate an amount that is owed, there is also an additional stipulation that the individual also show the Federal agency that he or she intends to pay without fail, in spite of relocating from the country.

9. The day of the appointment can be unnerving. In my experience, I missed the first appointment, because I overslept. But I was able to call back to reschedule on an express line because of having had a confirmation earlier. Again, it was a time expensive call, especially for those that may need to plan for travel. The appointment , itself was a chill experience. I tend to plan for backups and hence had a number of copies of the form. At the appointment, I was asked to provide two copies. (This was not mentioned anywhere on the website)

10. IRS officer took a few minutes to validate the form, and also required an approval from his higher official. This was perhaps the easiest, in my case and this went through without so much a fuss. I guess, I walked out feeling extremely satisfied for the outcome. Although, I will admit on the amount of stress I had felt through out the process.

Working further, based on my personal experience, I established the following emotional highs and lows. I definitely did not have time to bring this to a bigger ambitious side project for the lack of time, by including more interviews and obtaining folks to do so. However, that may have added more validation on the emotional highs and the lows and helped to uncover more patterns or insights. But for the moment bringing myself to use this tool was a work of few hours, but an enjoyable one though.

The result was following few insights out of this exercise

1. The timeline to obtain this is extremely short but it holds quite a lot of mental space for any individual who is probably already overwhelmed with the amount of changes that comes along with moving or relocation. Thus if companies provide for relocation assistance or tax consultancy, perhaps, this should also be a part of that exercise to help the individual transition smoothly.
2. In the world of smartphones and technology, the procedure to call and setup an appointment appears outdated. Could this have been improved in some ways, or could Tax portals such as Turbo Tax, etc also provide such a tax service for users, to make this easier? There is a lack of awareness for such important procedures.
3. An online organizing platforms for all of the tax documents, that can pull information through different sources?

Originally published at thedesignsimile.wordpress.com on December 10, 2018.