
The IRS Really Needs Some New Computers - arbuge
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-17/the-irs-computer-system-is-the-oldest-in-the-government
======
Lionsion
The IRS _already nearly developed_ a system to automatically translate their
mainframe assembler logic into Java and check its correctness, but the main
developer was hired on some special kind of program (to bypass the government
salary structure) which could not be renewed before the project was completed.

Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329)
(The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java)

[https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-
commentary/2018/01/ir...](https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-
commentary/2018/01/irs-clutches-its-modernization-holy-grail/):

> Now, IRS is on the verge of solving this problem. The solution was
> engineered by a group of about eight people. And not under a multi-hundred-
> million-dollar systems integration contract. A leader of the group was Jian
> Wang, a Chinese emigre who is now a naturalized citizen. Wang told me his
> solution isn’t a silver bullet but rather a carefully worked-out
> methodology. It has three components so potentially powerful the IRS has
> filed patent applications for them.

> I say “was” because he’s left the agency, and the status of the project is
> dark.

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had
> since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which
> it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former
> Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority
> in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s
> Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

> “The last one ran out this past summer,” Koskinen said. The departures
> included Wang. He says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive
> Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But
> his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment
> authority expired. By then he’d accepted another job. Wang says he had a
> house to pay for, kids to educate. Koskinen confirms the agency wanted to
> convert Wang. But the process of approval from Treasury headquarters and the
> Office of Personnel Management simply took too long.

~~~
pavpanchekha
To explain the "special kind of program" further, the US government has a very
strict salary ladder (the "General Schedule" and similar), necessary to keep
the enormous federal workforce paid fairly and without corruption. However,
the salary ladder has not kept up with the explosion of incomes for very
specialized professionals. For example, the scheduled salaries generally lie
below the $400k salary for the president; top engineers sometimes earn more
than that, and top engineering managers often do. This makes it hard to hire
those professionals.

The special kind of program here is a special allowance from Congress to hire
people at salaries larger than the general schedule allows; Congress gives
this right to some agencies for a limited time when it perceives a need (and
politics allow). For another example, Congress gave the FDA the right to do
this last year to allow it to hire more drug reviewers (a job pharma companies
are willing to pay a lot for).

In this case, Congress allowed the program to run out too soon (perhaps due to
budget negotiation issues, perhaps due to oversight). Often that leads to
people leaving and a lot of social and organizational capital drying up, just
like it did here.

~~~
madengr
Ha ha, “generally lie below $400k”. Usually way below 400k.

~~~
Lionsion
Doesn't the president's salary define the statutory maximum, though?

~~~
madengr
Don't know; probably. Certainly it's screwed up as presidents are a dime a
dozen. The guy mentioned in the article is not.

------
johnklos
The article made no real case for the replacement of the IRS' computers. Sure,
there's a case for updating their software, but this isn't the same thing as
what the title says.

I think people seem to forget that newer does NOT mean better, and that an
old, slow computer which is reliable is infinitely better than a new, fast
computer which is either unreliable or idiosyncratic (or both).

Contemporary IT seems to have forgotten some wonderful things about
mainframes. Most projects to "modernize" working computing systems are just
about companies grabbing contract money, and if a proper job happens to get
done, it's more or less incidental. This is why we could go to the Moon in a
decade but can't build a replacement for the Space Shuttle in that time. If we
had to rebuild the Hoover Dam or the Empire State Building these days, there's
no possible way it'd ever be done in the timeframes of the original projects.
It's a bit sad, really.

~~~
patentatt
I think the real problem here is that the mainframe assembler codebase is
undocumented, and decades of idiosyncratic corner-cases and bug fixes are only
present in the source code. If the system was fully documented, it could be
trivially re-implemented in any language or platform of choice. That's why I
think this kind of "modernization" project can be really useful, because it
forces the organization to define its requirements.

Edit: Just to take this concept a little but further, I'd argue that
"software" is an illusion. Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or
'business' software should be able to be fully defined and written on paper,
by humans, before a single developer is engaged to translate those
requirements to something a computer can run. The exceptions would be more
elaborate things like video games, AI stuff, and things that rely on computers
to do what they do. Anything that is automating what humans do (like the IRS
here) should be written on paper first, code second. All too often non-
technical management doesn't understand this, as it's boring and hard. It's
easier to throw money at 'consultants' to pry the requirements out of them and
then complain at how expensive the "software" is - while the real expense is
just asking your business people what they actually do.

~~~
taborj
> Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or 'business' software should be
> able to be fully defined and written on paper, by humans, before a single
> developer is engaged to translate those requirements to something a computer
> can run.

This was literally day one of my systems architecture class in college, over
20 years ago. It's probably done more often than you think, but the problem is
the workflows change slightly over time, and rather than go back to the
drawing board each time, they just tweak the systems software. The result,
though, is a mess.

~~~
patentatt
Surely it's not unheard of, but as a former 'consultant' I would always be
amazed that the client hadn't documented their workflow by the time we showed
up. We'd usually have a team of BA's work with the client for a few months
before code was written, all because the management didn't know how their
business ran. Reading between the lines here, it seems that perhaps the IRS is
in a similar situation, and the only canonical source of truth for how things
work is encoded in the assembler source code.

------
Liquix
We talk about scaling a lot, but rarely look past "more traffic" or "ten years
from now".

This is becoming an issue for the first time because the concept of "massively
complex computer system at the core of a business" has only been around for
half a century or so. Every year it gets more and more expensive (in terms of
both people-hours and $$$) to rebuild, refactor, or even improve the system.
People who make decisions see the gigantic pricetag on fixing something that
already works and opt for patches instead, which is understandable - why fix
something that isn't broken (yet), especially when it would cost _that_ much?

But as the article describes, when it comes down to the wire and a ground-up
refactor is necessary for a system which is 30-60 years old, there may not be
enough people who understand the hardware/software, those people are too
important to reallocate to the project, or there's simply not enough
time/money left to make it happen. I would imagine this new dilemma will start
to become much more common in the next 10 years as legacy systems age beyond
feasible maintainability.

~~~
bluGill
Are you one of the people who bring up
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/) ?

The big re-write seems to be what you are proposing...

------
yssrn
The IRS has a $11,526,389,000 budget. Their Information Services division has
a $2,237,659,000 budget, and 6,089 employees.

So the issue isn't a lack of funding or personnel, it's bureaucratic
incompetence.

~~~
um_ya
This is the only case in which I'm okay with bureaucratic incompetence.

~~~
monocasa
You still owe them the same amount; their delay is just an adds uncertainty to
the process.

------
LethargicStud
> Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited.

Does this mean 1/200 people get audited, or of the people who meet the
conditions to be audited, only 1/200 of them will be audited? The article
doesn't differentiate between whether people today should be audited but are
not due to the systems in place, or perhaps that simply less people today meet
the criteria to be audited and the computers are still doing their job just
fine.

~~~
Mtinie
A good question. 145,070,000 tax returns were processed through September
2017[1]. If the rate was one return out of every two hundred, there would have
been ~725,000 audits conducted.

Multiple sources I found online reported “just over 1 million audits were
conducted in 2016” (~1/120) but the number was expected to go down in 2017 due
to budgetary reasons.

It is reasonable to extrapolate this value and find it in line with the
original “1/200 returns”, out of the total population of filed returns.

[1] [https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-
we...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-week-ending-
september-1-2017)

------
bsvalley
I think this article doesn't cover the actual problem. Majority of the people
who work for the IRS are above 45 years old. We're looking at a pick around
50-55 years old. So if they change their system, they might have to get rid of
a lot people at the same time. Which they can't or if they could, it would
cost them way more than just electronics and electricity.

source: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-age-of-people-
work...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-age-of-people-working-at-
the-U-S-Department-of-the-Treasury)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The USA treasury can't do redundancies? Or indeed have their personnel
reskill?

------
voidmain
I doubt a lack of "new computers" is the problem, but
[https://directpay.irs.gov/directpay/payment](https://directpay.irs.gov/directpay/payment)
currently reads:

Direct Pay

This service is temporarily unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue.
Please come back later and try again, or you can visit the Make a Payment page
for alternative payment methods. We apologize for any inconvenience.

 _Note that your tax payment is due although IRS Direct Pay may not be
available._

------
whb07
Another strong reason to implement the concept of a simple flat tax, without
the pages and pages of magic accounting trickery.

It really shouldn’t be that complicated:

Salary wages * tax rate

Investment delta * tax rate

Why does that take thousands of lines on a tax return ?

~~~
vonmoltke
"[T]housands of lines"? Really? How many private citizens have ever had a
return that long? The base form is two pages. Schedule A for itemized
deductions is one page. Schedule B for dividends and interest is one page.
Schedule D for capital gains is two pages. So, six pages total for your
situation. Barely qualifies as hundreds, particularly since many don't even
need to be filled out.

US tax code is definitely more complicated than it needs to be, but the
repeated assertions here that this complication extends to the simple case are
bullshit.

~~~
whb07
Have you ever done a 990? I don’t mean “paid for one” but I mean truly sat
down and did it? It’s ridiculous and each ridiculous line has more baggage
attached to each.

So to you, I tell you that the tax code for the US is significantly bigger
than the tax return a private individual like yourself files yearly [0].

Tax liabilities should be a simple event and should not require a tax
professional and other accounting tricks to lessen the burden. In the current
environment, those who pay top dollar for tax lawyers and accountants are able
to maximize their taxes. The small business and individual is left a higher
regulatory burden and are forced to eat the costs.

A regular person should be able to properly pay taxes in a quick, clear and
efficient manner. It shouldn’t require a professional who’s job it is to deal
with the gross mismanagement of government.

[0]:[https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-
code/](https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-code/)

~~~
vonmoltke
> Have you ever done a 990? I don’t mean “paid for one” but I mean truly sat
> down and did it? It’s ridiculous and each ridiculous line has more baggage
> attached to each.

No, but your post was about individual taxes. Form 990 is only filed by non-
profit organizations, which certainly do not fit the formulas for individuals
you posted above.

> So to you, I tell you that the tax code for the US is significantly bigger
> than the tax return a private individual like yourself files yearly.

Your initial post was referring to individuals, so that is what I was replying
to. You are being disingenuous by talking about corporate tax code complexity
next to burdens on individuals.

> A regular person should be able to properly pay taxes in a quick, clear and
> efficient manner. It shouldn’t require a professional who’s job it is to
> deal with the gross mismanagement of government.

Like I said, it can be better. However, I have never used a tax professional.
The burden is not nearly as great on individuals and small businesses as you
are claiming, as evidenced by you talking about 990s (which do not apply to
individuals and small businesses) and the overall tax code(the vast majority
of which does not apply to individuals and small businesses).

------
twunde
This was recently discussed in [https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-
commentary/2018/01/ir...](https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-
commentary/2018/01/irs-clutches-its-modernization-holy-grail/) HN discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329)

------
justadudeama
How do you think the IRS should go about updating? Do you thing something like
AWS is stable and safe enough fro something this important?

~~~
neffy
Start with really simplifying the tax code, and then do a complete rewrite.

Or wait until the whole mess collapses, and start with really simplifying...

~~~
s73v3r_
So how, exactly, would you simplify the tax code? And make sure it brings in
the same amount of revenue, and isn't extremely regressive? And make sure it
isn't trivially game-able?

~~~
neffy
Oh something like no tax up to a certain level, 3 or 4 bands from then on,
similar with inheritance tax, but a firm no dodging it policy for the very
high value estates. Crack down on all the trusts etc. Toss it into a decent
simulation and make regional adjustments depending on local income, and
actively try to address some of the regional imbalances over time with
national funding for things like schools.

It is btw. far easier to game a complex tax system than a simple one. Talk to
your current President about that.

At a certain point, the technical debt on this kind of thing is so large the
only thing to do is toss it out, and start again.

~~~
s73v3r_
"Oh something like no tax up to a certain level"

Already have that.

"3 or 4 bands from then on"

Already have that.

"similar with inheritance tax, but a firm no dodging it policy for the very
high value estates."

Already have that.

"Toss it into a decent simulation and make regional adjustments depending on
local income, and actively try to address some of the regional imbalances over
time with national funding for things like schools."

How is that going to make figuring out taxes easier? What if I live in one
cost of living area for a while, then move to an area with another cost of
living? Now I have to keep track of what income I earned where?

------
a-b
I'm wondering if it is possible to make this code open source.

------
segmondy
The IRS is so behind. To receive data from the IRS, I have 3 options.

CD

Tape! TAPE! 70's style Tape

Paper.

~~~
justjash
Yeah, my friend works for a decent sized company that writes banking software.
He mentioned that some of the larger clients send a person everyday by plane
with a tape for their daily data load. Seems strange in today's world.

~~~
bolasanibk
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway." \-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Depending on the amount of data and time of travel etc, it might be more
economical/reliable to do this than do it over the wire.

------
hulton
The IRS really needs to be shutdown. It is a toxic cancer.

------
TallGuyShort
>> The downward trend (in audits) has led to concerns that the IRS needs more
funding

BULLSHIT. There have been numerous threads on HN about private tax services
lobbying for complex tax processes. The amount of time and the level of
caution I have to go to to fill out IRS forms about income that the government
already knows about is ridiculous. The number of people getting audited
shouldn't be a linear measure of effectiveness. If anything it's the opposite.

------
pcunite
Quote from the article:

 _Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited. The
downward trend has led to concerns that the IRS needs more funding to do its
job correctly and competently. That’s true ..._

Does anyone here believe that the IRS is a good thing? The tax code could be
greatly simplified helping business owners to boost the economy. If you need
more _auditors_ , perhaps you're doing it wrong.

Imagine a "Revenue Service" that actually helped companies increase their
revenue instead of being a parasite. A one page form, simple questions, simple
tax code. Make tax day a celebration instead of a confusing trick of
loopholes.

~~~
azhenley
I've always wondered: Is the tax code kept complex because large accounting
firms lobby for it? Much profit (and many jobs) would be lost if it was
simplified.

~~~
TallGuyShort
In case you missed the thread about H&R Block on here the other day, the _do_
lobby for it. It may not be entirely that though - there's also plenty of
political capital to be had by pushing for special loopholes for special
people.

