According to an NPR interview with New York Times’ tax reporter David Cay Johnston, the $8 billion project to replace the Internal Revenue Service’s aging computer systems, which haven’t been upgraded since the Kennedy administration, is now 40 percent over budget and more than two years behind schedule.
Some interesting tidbits from the interview: The current system has 13 terabytes of data and requires a sequential scan to find taxpayer records. It has 40 years of bug fixes and patches. Patches were mainly due to changes in the complex tax laws; often they were made under tight schedules without decent record keeping. The system is written in a mixture of COBOL and 1960’s-era Assembler; skilled programmers in these languages are becoming harder and harder to find.
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