The Social Security Administration moved quickly to fill its chief information officer role.

The agency confirmed Rajive Mathur has been appointed the new deputy commissioner for systems and CIO.

Mathur will join the agency later this month, a SSA spokeswoman said in an email to Federal News Radio.

Mathur replaces Rob Klopp, who left in mid-April.

SSA says Mathur “has significant expertise as a senior government and private sector executive driving large-scale transformation and handling highly complex and public-facing issues in a complex operating environment while driving innovation and change.”

Mathur comes to SSA after spending the last six years at the IRS as its director of online services. He left the IRS last fall.

As director of online services, Mathur oversaw the development of a host of services including the Get Transcript tool, online applications and Where’s My Refund portal. The IRS said in fiscal 2016 citizens filed more than 168.8 million returns and other forms electronically. These represented 69.1 percent of all filings, an increase of 1.9 percent over the share of electronic filing in 2015.

Before joining the IRS, he spent two years as managing director for Careers After Combat.

Mathur also spent three years as vice president of online strategy for Fidelity Investments.

In coming to SSA, Mathur has big shoes to fill. Klopp helped turn around the agency and modernize its systems and data. One of the major systems Mathur will have to continue the progress on is the Disability Case Processing System, which Klopp turned around over the last two years. Additionally, SSA has about 60 million lines of COBOL and depends on mainframe systems for many of its key mission systems. Mathur also will have to continue to evolve SSA’s workforce to work in more modern software programming languages and continue the expansion of the agile development methodology.

The SSA inspector general reported in November as part of the annual Federal Information Security Management Act report to Congress that the agency must address persistent deficiencies in both the design and operation of controls related to the Department of Homeland Security reporting metrics.

“SSA should make protecting its networks and information systems a top priority and dedicate the resources needed to (1) ensure the appropriate design and operating effectiveness of information security controls and (2) prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information,” the IG stated.

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