DOE College Scorecard

Background
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Statistics of Income (SOI) Division is seeking contractor support to develop a calculator tool for the Department of Education’s (DOE) College Scorecard.

The goal is to create a public dataset that allows students to compare post-graduation earnings across various universities and programs while ensuring the confidentiality of Federal Tax Information (FTI). SOI contributes earnings data for specific cohorts identified by the DOE Federal Student Aid office, and due to the public nature of this data, it is crucial to implement statistical disclosure limitation methodologies based on differentially private algorithms.

Work Details
The contractor shall:
- Provide Python code to analyze, aggregate, and add noise to aggregates computed from raw data files from both DOE and IRS.
- Collaborate with IRS for initial tests on the calculator and validate the schema on the IRS server.
- Supply IRS with Excel macros to estimate error rates for user-input breakouts at various epsilon levels.
- Develop Python code for a RAAS server enabling IRS to define public outputs for multiple datasets, visualize privacy-utility tradeoffs, refine tabulations, and apply differentially private mechanisms.
- Create customized interactive evaluation tools in Excel for both IRS-SOI and DOE that allow adjustments in privacy loss budget parameters, workload parameters, and suppression thresholds.
- Support post-delivery research to enhance privacy-utility balance in future versions of the College Scorecard.
- Provide documentation or presentations to DOE staff.

Period of Performance
The contract will be performed over a base period of 12 months from the date of award.

Place of Performance
The work will be performed at locations specified by the IRS and DOE.