It started in the late 1990s, when the tax agency was under pressure to cut costs and boost efficiency.

Back then, IRS customer service representatives had to scroll through 90 screens to do a single interest computation, said Julie Rushin, director of strategy and finance for IRS’ Wage and Investment Division in Atlanta.

At the same time, Rushin’s division did not receive funding from Congress for annual increases, which amounted to $134 million. She had six months to identify places in her budget where the division could save that much money.

Enter the JEEDA system, an application that reduced from 90 to one the number of screens a service representative had to scroll through. Multiply these labor savings by the enormous scope of the IRS workload—more than 130 million individual returns are processed each year—and it’s easy to see how JEEDA saved the IRS $16 million the first year it was deployed.

JEEDA was developed by a few GS-5 “renegade programmers,” Rushin said. When she first heard people talking about JEEDA, Rushin thought it must be based on some mind-boggling technology.

But it turns out that JEEDA actually comes from “Gee, duh.” As in, “This is so self-evidently simple that I can’t believe nobody thought of it sooner.”

JEEDA is just one of 131 different applications IRS customer representatives use, Rushin said. When the tax agency put them all together, it amounted to a savings of 400 full-time positions.

IRS provides JEEDA and other similar applications to 10,000 IRS customer service representatives. Since JEEDA and the other tools have been implemented, error rates have gone down, Rushin said.

“We’re very proud of these employees and these innovations,” Rushin said. While some agencies talk about the importance of innovation, she said, the IRS makes a point of welcoming new ideas.