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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

#131

Post by Shivetya »

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?

IBM has already shown that the machine layer and the OS layer can be separate and that progression in one does not necessarily require a full change in the other.

the method by which it works is that code compiled into a new form which can be translated on the fly to match the hardware level below it.

now what is probably trapping the IRS besides a base that not everyone full understands but the sheer complexity of what they have to deal with, the tax code and whims of those in Congress.

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

#132

Post by forapurpose »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #85
reaperducer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's general reporting by general reporters using general language for the general public. It's not a tech publication. Joe Lunchbucket doesn't care if it's hardware that failed or software. The system failed. That's what his tax dollars pay for.

There's no reason not to include the details. People who don't care can ignore them.

> There's no reason not to include the details. People who don't care can ignore them.

Based on my experience regularly communicating technical information to non-technical people, the above suggestion works out very poorly. Each technical detail is a hurdle for the listener, causing misunderstanding, frustration, feelings of inadequacy, and doubt about your competence as an advisor and communicator. Generally, they respond like most people do when confronted with something unpleasant; they tune out your message. My advice is to include the minimum possible technical details and to express them in the clearest possible non-technical language.

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

#134

Post by danso »

DrScump wrote: post #117
rbanffy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That would be a huge exploit/privacy risk.

How would it be a privacy risk, unless, the data files were included/embedded in the source code repo?

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

#135

Post by candreasen »

rbanffy wrote: post #100
Lionsion wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm guessing that would scare the crap out of the masses. Security by obscurity may not work but if there ever were a glitch or breach it sure does look bad to say "and they knew about the bug because we made our codebase public"

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

#136

Post by DrScump »

heartbreak wrote: post #130
DrScump wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a huge exploit/privacy risk.

Right because that's what we say about the Linux kernel too, right? If IRS is the maintainer, they still review changes. And so do all of us. If someone slips in an exploit, we'll catch it the same way every other open source project does.

Unless it's an exploit-able weakness that is discovered only because the source is open to be both read and tested against, like Heartbleed.

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

#137

Post by romaniv »

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?

>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.

Is this a question the industry actually cares about? If anything, I'd say it got much worse at creating long-living software. It sucks to run a mainframe-based system from 50 years ago, but running a 10-year-old Web Forms application can be borderline impossible. I'm scared to think of what will happen with all the cloud-based stuff in the next 10 years.

>How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software?

I often say that there is no such thing as "business" logic. There is just logic. The least maintainable systems I've worked with were the ones with the most sophisticated attempts at abstraction.

In my opinion, the key to software longevity is making systems that allow for local reasoning, i.e. analyzing parts without knowing the whole. This can be achieved in a lot of different ways, but it needs to be a deliberate goal in system design.

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

#138

Post by adventured »

nkristoffersen wrote: post #105
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason not to include the details. People who don't care can ignore them.

But how many details do you include? How much ram? Length of the power cords? It is the job of the writer to write for the audience, not include every single detail, no?

Enough so that the tax payers understand the IRS isn't actually running on an IT system from 1958. That's a pretty hilariously low bar to set for a journalist to step over.

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

#139

Post by conanbatt »

monocasa wrote: post #129
conanbatt wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. You are making the case that a flat tax is regressive because current income taxes are progressive. So moving from progressive to flat is regressive. Its a tautological affirmation on progressive taxes being progressive. A flat tax would make a $24,900 pay $3,735, and if you made $249,000 you would pay $3735, your taxes increase just as proportional to your income. Its just..flat.

No I'm making the argument that a flat tax is regressive because the utilitarian value of a dollar isn't anywhere near linear with total income. With a flat tax: * On the high end you're taking from ability to have luxuries. * On the low end you're taking from the ability to pay rent and put enough food on your table for your children.

After criticizing my argument that looking at spending of taxes is necessary to argue if its progressive or regressive, you now propose an argument that would make progressive taxes also regressive unless they are enough to compensate the utilitarian value of how the poorer and the richer spend their own wealth.

The utilitarian argument is for me one of the most practical and also one of the most scary. Are you ready to exploit the poor if it were proven that it was economically profitable to do so? I digress. My point is that seeing flat taxes as regressive is either false or inconclusive, regardless of the desire of being flat, regressive or progressive in taxation.

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

#140

Post by reaperducer »

mbell wrote: post #102
reaperducer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date Easy to say as a grunt, but businesses (and governments) are run by managers and accountants. What you describe is upgrading for upgrading's sake. If a system isn't broken, there's no point or financial reason to replace it. Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data…

> Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. There were about 150M individual tax returns and ~5.8M corporate returns in 2015. Even if we assume 50 years of storage in the 'active' dataset that…

>I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved.

The one billion figure was from the article.

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