IRS systems crash came after years of warnings to Congress

www.politico.com...

In fact, in his final news conference as commissioner, Koskinen warned of a “potential for a catastrophic system failure,” adding, “I don’t want anyone to say they weren’t warned.” The IRS uses some software that dates to the Kennedy administration, other software that’s no longer supported by manufacturers and some of its hardware is two or three upgrades out of date. Tuesday's glitch happened on a newer piece of hardware on which the 1960s-era software runs, according to IRS officials, who reiterated that there were no signs that an external security breach caused the outage. Once it malfunctioned, it took down other connected parts of the system.

Does anyone have any real reasons as too why the brits do not upgrade the illegal pay system?(found in the ats link)

It just seems as if they do not care how they get their money as long as the irs continues to ruin lives in the name of debt.(imho)

WOW 1960's technology backing the largest theft in world history on a continual basis...(found in the linked article)

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

It is quite enjoyable to me to browse the ole ats threads on the subject...

Does anyone have any real reasons as too why the brits do not upgrade the illegal pay system?

Why the Brits?

ETA : Ah, just noticed in one of the links... Never mind me, it's the end of the day

Warmest respects

Lags

Well, if they spend hundreds of million per year in order to collect tens of millions per year in taxes..... I'm not surprised they don't have the funds to upgrade their software.

You can also look at this as clear evidence that the Public Sector has zero incentive to innovate or drive anything forward.

Our tax system needs abolishing. But, short of that, it at least needs modernizing.

What pisses me off the most is the shuffling of administrative costs from Uncle Sam to me (in the form of form 1099's, etc), while they still balloon the departments labor costs.

The one thing I look forward to when I die is not having to complete tax forms. I do it at work, and i hate the idea of having to do it at home.

Even more funner link...

paynoincometax.com...

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Our tax system needs abolishing. But, short of that, it at least needs modernizing.

What pisses me off the most is the shuffling of administrative costs from Uncle Sam to me (in the form of form 1099's, etc), while they still balloon the departments labor costs.

The one thing I look forward to when I die is not having to complete tax forms. I do it at work, and i hate the idea of having to do it at home.

There really is no excuse for the complexity of the income tax code. The amount of money saved by significantly reducing the complexity would be enormous both to us taxpayers and in the administrative costs.

a reply to: Edumakated

The sheer amount of fraud, intentional and not, would likely make it all worthwhile.

Keep in mind...half our nation falls on the lower end of the IQ scale. Even a 1099 EZ is too complex for a large portion of society.

originally posted by: Edumakated

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Our tax system needs abolishing. But, short of that, it at least needs modernizing.

What pisses me off the most is the shuffling of administrative costs from Uncle Sam to me (in the form of form 1099's, etc), while they still balloon the departments labor costs.

The one thing I look forward to when I die is not having to complete tax forms. I do it at work, and i hate the idea of having to do it at home.

There really is no excuse for the complexity of the income tax code. The amount of money saved by significantly reducing the complexity would be enormous both to us taxpayers and in the administrative costs.

Consider who writes the tax code, and who benefits the most from the complexities written into the code.

Having spent more than 20 years explaining and enforcing the tax laws in my state, I can tell you that the vast majority of the tax laws exist to to protect and increase the wealth of corporations and the super-wealthy who own and control them. Perhaps even as much as 85% of the tax laws on the books are there to serve that one purpose.

I work in IT with managed clients in Mid-Michigan. A lot of our customers are manufacturers with very old equipment and software that they just don't want to spend money to upgrade or learn to use. This, however, is whole other level. I've heard tech horror stories from friends that work in government but this is almost criminal. 1960's era software? WTF? Like when we were launching Apollo missions software? I can't even.


EDIT: I found a photo taken yesterday of the IRS hard at work on our paperwork.

a reply to: howtonhawky
I have good experience on why the U.S. and Brits have not updated these systems:

1) I first started coding and supporting code in Plan and Assembler languages,
2) As an outsourcer I have supported most High street UK Banks on one system or another,
3) I have chaired a software development forum of 3 UK banks and built for them Stock and Gilts interfaces into the Bank of England.

I can tell you that into the mid 90s at least, 3 of the top banks had a core Transaction module from the 60s written in assembler. All their IT systems were built around this core module because:

a) Nobody had documented the assembler programs that were written,
b) You need to be an experienced assembler programmer to reverse engineer what it is doing,
c) This is because it is written in hexadecimal - i.e. bytes of value 1 to 255 noted in base 16 using characters 0-9, A to F, with FF being 255.
d) Imagine that each line contains:
i) an instruction (these at least are documented) such as "Move A to B" might be instruction 7B,
ii) arguments for the instruction
iii) parameters for the instruction
e) To interpret what a line is doing you need to interpret the instruction, work out how many arguments it should have and how many bytes they are, work out how many parameters are required and how many bytes each of those parameters are.
f) That might explain the 1 line... but you don't know what the data in memory block "X" represents and how it has already been manipulated in the program!
g) you literally have to write down on paper what data elements are held where, then what each line does and then where the data element has moved to.
h) you then have to re read your documentation to see the flow of the data through the program and understand what is being done!!!

In this old world NO DOCUMENTATION went on to cause billions of dollars of unnecessary cost working around what nobody could understand once COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC came out.

ETA - once you think you have understood the program you then need to test that exhaustively against every possible data input to confirm your thinking is correct - if you don't then a single byte wrong could lose trillions into the aether.

a reply to: howtonhawky


When it comes to technology and government agencies none of them want to be bleeding edge.

Upgrades cost money. New technology has its own issues. Systems, even within your own department, may not be able to talk to each other after an upgrade.

On the flip side, not upgrading has its issues as well. Life cycle renewal, licensing, support, etc. Plus you already have an aging work force that you cannot just toss out or nothing will work anymore.

Either option is not good when systems just have to work. Upgrade and kill something now; or, do not upgrade and pay for it later.

An upgrade is typically a multi million, multi year, project. Like everything else, the costs always go up. So you end up with remediation steps which is mostly, put a nice website interface on it! That is why there are jobs for COBOL programmers.

And uh, the IRS tax system is American ("Kennedy administration"), so what have the Brits to do with this?

It really is pretty ancient hardware and software the IRS uses. It took them almost 3 months to upgrade the security verification system in just one small part of the IRS.

Maybe they can hire the Geniuses who designed the Health Insurance Marketplace.

A Modern system would make taxes an almost instanano us process for most.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

And uh, the IRS tax system is American ("Kennedy administration"), so what have the Brits to do with this?

i was just linking some previous irs threads in the op.

worth a gander if uve the time

originally posted by: dothedew
Well, if they spend hundreds of million per year in order to collect tens of millions per year in taxes..... I'm not surprised they don't have the funds to upgrade their software.

You can also look at this as clear evidence that the Public Sector has zero incentive to innovate or drive anything forward.

It's the same across the USA. Even in Califorrnia. The original tax code software was implemented in COBOL, with thousands of categories of job positions, exemptions, overtime rules, tax deductions, credits, all taking into account marital status, children, number of homes, loans, income sources. Then every year, these get updated with new rules, exemptions, amendments, new clauses. By the times the system was in use for 20 years, it would be impossible to rewrite because millions of pensions were now based on those calculations. The best that could be done would be to write a virtual machine that emulates the original hardware.

But the system hardware has to be ultra-reliable and not reboot simply because a Microsoft auto-upgrade didn't work as expected or temporary storage became clogged up with adverts. So mainframe hardware that is operating 24/7 is the only option.

a reply to: RelSciHistItSufi

sounds right to me...

lol

i actually did understand some of what your point is.

Back in the day i would love to sift through the payperview tv card programs.

a reply to: RelSciHistItSufi

Nice to find a fellow who knows the 1900 series and all its problems

While not having to do as risky stuff as you i've had to merge mainframes and their loads which aint a fun task and theres the old rule of "if it aint broke don't fix it" and if you don't know your xpjc from your xpjw you are in serious trouble.

Theres loads of IBM stuff running code from the 1960's as the risk of changing it to a newer system is too much as even a small one day f-up will possibly cause loads of trouble for a bank .

But they don't have any money to fix it!
Congress needs to bail them out.
Of course if they used all that money spent on employee bonuses for computers they could compete with Google by now.

Two points to add.

1. How much money will they need. Billions for the bosses and then ... send it to India and pay them Millions. Everyone's happy except for the citizens.

2. Prime target for the Terrorists. But ... that is not on their playlist. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

P

a reply to: RelSciHistItSufi

Wait...so if they break one machine or corrupt one program then there is no more debt?!

Because no one can fix it if it does break?

cool.

a reply to: tadaman
Correct but... also consider that if you wanted to siphon off a penny in every dollar to creating a breakaway civilisation or funding mars bases, developing a computer language that no one can safely interpret except the author (assembler) would be EXTREMELY useful.