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IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

nextgov.com

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Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#91

Post by chx »

cptskippy wrote: post #54

I feel like the authors of this article are being very misleading by using broader terms where they could be more specific, like using system where they could instead say software. The IRS isn't running 60 year old hardware, and the failure was in hardware that was just 18 months old. But because the IRS is running software that is 60 years old, the authors can claim the "system" dates back to the 1960s. It's also cl…

The oldest parts are not System 360, they run IBM 7074 assembly. Just FYI. The caching system is much newer, they have some Java proxy, there were posts about it the last year.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#92

Post by [deleted] »

cptskippy wrote: post #54

I feel like the authors of this article are being very misleading by using broader terms where they could be more specific, like using system where they could instead say software. The IRS isn't running 60 year old hardware, and the failure was in hardware that was just 18 months old. But because the IRS is running software that is 60 years old, the authors can claim the "system" dates back to the 1960s. It's also cl…

[deleted]

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#93

Post by ChuckMcM »

raverbashing wrote: post #34

The question for the industry remains: how do we deal with systems that should be up for 10 years? 25 yrs? 50 yrs? 100 yrs? We didn't even have computers as they exist today 50 years ago. How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software?

We have shown pretty clearly that any computer we build at day 1 can be emulated perfectly by a computer built day 1 + 50 years. However, building systems that can evolve is a larger issue.

The nut here is that these systems evolve in a very haphazard way do to funding availability, scaling stresses, and changing requirements.

For the IRS, I think it would be useful to engage the US Digital Service to see if they could design a system based on a cluster of non-specific hardware with only network interfaces, that could host a 'tax computation engine' and a growable data store. While it is a 'big' problem, it is not as big as some of the problems I have seen hosted on 25,000 machines as a 'small' cluster. That is 800,000 cores (assuming 32 core machines) so for 140M tax payers that is 175 payers per machine. Something that could no doubt process every return in a single day, and run fraud analysis as well.

Clearly the government needs warehouse scale computers that their vendor (IBM) is not in a position (yet?) to deliver.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#94

Post by rbanffy »

Lionsion wrote: post #66
johnklos wrote: post #18

Something that the kids of IT today will never learn: Never replace anything unless the thing doing the replacing is better than the thing being replaced. The IRS' IT "upgrade" is just a huge money grab. Nobody has the slightest interest or desire to do anything properly - they simply want in on that lucrative IRS money. It's like the saying: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no ac…

> The IRS' IT "upgrade" is just a huge money grab. Nobody has the slightest interest or desire to do anything properly - they simply want in on that lucrative IRS money. This is factually wrong (at least for the most current effort): https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir... An eight person IRS development team nearly finished building a replacement, but the main developers were hired on a speci…

Open-source it and we'll help with the fixes.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#95

Post by pwg »

monocasa wrote: post #29
briandear wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is why we have a tax system that would need 10,000 additional customer support reps. The problem isn’t a lack of reps, it’s a system that requires that many reps. The flat tax, file-on-a-postcard system proposed by 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz was mocked by the establishment because it seemed tha politicians on both sides have a vested interest in a complex tax code — it is the means by whic…

You can stay away from regressive schemes like a flat tax, and have a tax system with a rubberstamp level of UX. That's how it works in most of Europe and could work here. The IRS already has all of the information needed outside of gambling and stocks, and could simply send you forms already filled out for you to sign. H&R Block and TurboTax simply heavily lobby to keep this from happening to keep their business mod…

> The IRS already has all of the information needed outside of gambling and stocks,

With the reporting changes of a few years back, for any stocks acquired after the changes took effect, they also already have all the information needed for the stocks as well. All that is missing is the type of sale you wished to make (FIFO, LIFO, average cost, etc.) when you sell the stock if you don't sell all of it off at once.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#96

Post by rbanffy »

chx wrote: post #91
cptskippy wrote: post #54

I feel like the authors of this article are being very misleading by using broader terms where they could be more specific, like using system where they could instead say software. The IRS isn't running 60 year old hardware, and the failure was in hardware that was just 18 months old. But because the IRS is running software that is 60 years old, the authors can claim the "system" dates back to the 1960s. It's also cl…

The oldest parts are not System 360, they run IBM 7074 assembly. Just FYI. The caching system is much newer, they have some Java proxy, there were posts about it the last year.

I assume it runs under an emulator by now.

Once I did manual disassembly of compiled code back into a high-level (for the time) language. It wasn't very fun, but , thankfully, the compilers of the day didn't optimize much.

It'd be a fun project.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#97

Post by jcranmer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #93
raverbashing wrote: post #34

The question for the industry remains: how do we deal with systems that should be up for 10 years? 25 yrs? 50 yrs? 100 yrs? We didn't even have computers as they exist today 50 years ago. How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software?

We have shown pretty clearly that any computer we build at day 1 can be emulated perfectly by a computer built day 1 + 50 years. However, building systems that can evolve is a larger issue. The nut here is that these systems evolve in a very haphazard way do to funding availability, scaling stresses, and changing requirements. For the IRS, I think it would be useful to engage the US Digital Service to see if they cou…

> We have shown pretty clearly that any computer we build at day 1 can be emulated perfectly by a computer built day 1 + 50 years.

We can emulate pretty much any old system, but emulated "perfectly" is at best not demonstrated and at worst already proven wrong. Perfect emulation implies emulating the undocumented bugs that end up working--and there are a lot of those. Getting the correct behavior in the case of parallel components (note that this applies even to single-core systems, since dedicated hardware constructs can race with the CPU) is particularly tricky. Even without parallel issues, you can have cases where software blatantly violates the API but it works reliably and consistently, necessitating complex emulation to make it work correctly (there are some games that don't work on WINE for this reason).

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#98

Post by rbanffy »

Elv13 wrote: post #82
varjag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, 140 million taxpayers account for a lot of punchcards.

(assuming it is not /sarcasm) The data is not stored in punch cards, the programs are/were. The data is/was stored in tapes or in tape emulators. Storing data on cards would make random access wayyyy too slow (the operator would have to retrieve and load the card and keep them sorted manually, which is impossible to do at scale) On tape, however, you can predict the distance you have to rewind by computing the physic…

I did a bit of stuff with data coming in on punchcards. You get a batch of punchcards, run it through a program (which can load data from tape or other punchcards) and a new batch of new punchcards with updated data come out on the other side, along with an impressive pile of printed invoices.

Wide adoption of tape was a lifesaver.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#99

Post by rhizome »

rbanffy wrote: post #94
Lionsion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The IRS' IT "upgrade" is just a huge money grab. Nobody has the slightest interest or desire to do anything properly - they simply want in on that lucrative IRS money. This is factually wrong (at least for the most current effort): https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir... An eight person IRS development team nearly finished building a replacement, but the main developers were hired on a speci…

Open-source it and we'll help with the fixes.

And then we'll see how vicious the incumbent companies get. There's no FUD greater than government contractor FUD.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#100

Post by rbanffy »

Lionsion wrote: post #68
favorited wrote: post #2

Fun (scary) fact – significant portions of the IRS tax system is still written in assembly. It's basically the original codebase plus 40 years of additions and patches as the tax code changed. They were working on projects to "elevate" it to Java, because it's pretty difficult to maintain it as-is.

> Fun (scary) fact – significant portions of the IRS tax system is still written in assembly. It's basically the original codebase plus 40 years of additions and patches as the tax code changed. > They were working on projects to "elevate" it to Java, because it's pretty difficult to maintain it as-is. Yeah, apparently an eight person IRS development team nearly developed a replacement, but the main developers were h…

Couldn't they open-source it? I assume finishing it would be relatively quick and a lot of comp-sci graduates would love to have the chance to play with IRS systems.
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