11–20 of 74 posts
This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.
What made you think that?
If they have this kind of cash why not just fix the system they already have and improve IRS Free File and make it available to everyone?
He literally gloated on his website about closing it
This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.
Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
AI definitely won’t help with that.
This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.
Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
Plus tax laws change every year, in many cases causing massive changes. Every conversion failed because no one is left fully understands the whole system.
Plus for a conversion, you need a long quiet time, with the tax laws you never get that.
Not to mention, even with Biden's additional funding, which I am sure it will be cut, it is far from the amount needed for a successful project.
So here we are. I think some "modernization" has occurred, but the core system is still running some 60 year old software.
Note, I knew a lot of people who worked there prior to 2000, so maybe what I know is a bit out of date. But I doubt it since the attempts I have read about over the past 20 years did not succeed.
This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.
Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
People can still submit paper returns (and this is common for any businesses beyond a certain size- I've seen 200+ pages for a small-ish company's return). Supporting documentation and schedules can be non-standard (like receipts, letters, exhibits, spreadsheets, contracts, etc.), and the forms themselves can be hand-written and the other docs can be on inconsistent paper sizes so bulk ocr of any kind is rough.
Really, you have several challenging problems- maybe 200M individual returns filed every year, who knows how many corporate returns, all of the daily/monthly/quarterly filings for payroll, then for tax season you have an army of temp workers who are responsible for doing manual data entry which is cumbersome.
Then you have the financial management/reporting/reconciliation side of it. The volume is staggering. Electronic transfers in both directions, handling paper checks both to and from taxpayers. More manual data entry for manual payments.
And the kicker of all this is that it actually works for some pretty reasonable value of that term. And everyone here knows what the code probably looks like and we definitely know what the code's documentation looks like.
How would you like to sit down with the nearly 7,000 pages of the US Tax Code and start taking a bite of that monster? It's not a reference manual- the amount of cross referencing with other laws and regulations required would be monumental.
So, you are correct, AI is definitely not the answer; But I suspect the AI is for rooting out tax cheats (or maybe certain tax cheats), not running the system itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language. AI definitely won’t help with that.
This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.
> I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. What made you think that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language. AI definitely won’t help with that.
AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language. AI definitely won’t help with that.
AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
It is one of the things they are best at.
Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets.
It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
> IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...
> IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java
Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability.
It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.