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No EZ Fix For The IRS
meltoast writes "Apparently the IRS is storing all of the taxpaying histories of 227 million individuals and corporations in a system that still runs code written in 1962. CIO Magazine is running a story on the IRS's nearly failed $8 billion modernization attempt that includes missed deadlines, cost overruns of over $200 million and four CIO's in seven years."
CIO Magazine is running a story on the IRS's nearly failed $8 billion modernization attempt that includes missed deadlines, cost overruns of over $200 million and four CIO's in seven years."
Ummmm......If this project was my responsibility, as CTO I believe I would have canned the whole project and started anew as from the sounds of it, there is too much baggage with which to continue. So, here we go: Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project so that nobody gets paid unless key points in the strategy are reached.
A simple strategy might be to run and fund the project entirely within the IRS structure and take the following strategy:
While the linked article is short on what exactly is going wrong with the transfer, I was talking with a guy working on the project in an airport last year. According to him, one of the big problems the IRS is facing is that everybody is talking about incompatible data formats and getting data to migrate from one database to another while maintaining taxpayer information. This may be a little glib, but perhaps we could take a more direct approach to updating the data file structures like deciding upon a data format a priori and simply, through brute force, repopulating the new database with the old data? We could create a few thousand temporary (2-3 year) jobs for those folks on welfare or currently out of work and using redundant strategies for error correction, manually enter the data into the new formats.
Done.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Don't fix it. Also if they store it on Linux I'm seceding from the Union. Jack.
The tax preparers do it, why not the tax reviewers?
because it's a play on a tax form. The 1040EZ, get it? HAHAHAHA!
Look on the bright side. There's no way Windows worms can touch this.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
FairTax.org
:wq
Stiff them on $2 and get fined up the ass.
$200 million is kind of small compared to $8b. That would be like me buying a car for $8,000, and finding out there was $200 in "transportation costs" or something.
_______
2B1ASK1
What percentage of our income taxes paid in the US goes towards collecting those same taxes?
How much could be saved by moving to a flat tax and getting rid of all the exemptions and deductions and tax-breaks?
Income: xxxxxx
x 0.20
Tax owed: xxx
You could fire 99% of the IRS employees and get the operating budget to that of a Taco Bell.
What?
I don't understand why they just don't get Intuit to do it.
No pun intended.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Why not publish the taxing rules and let someone
throw together a Postgresql/Apache software package?
Can I audit them when they just "write it off" ?
doesnt unix still run code from the 1970's or there abouts? just because its old doesnt mean it sucks. linux still runs code from its early days also. just a question anthony
At least this way IRS has guaranteed income of $699 per person, company, pet, and everything else in the countey.
cost overruns of over $200 million
next time i'm off by $200 million while paying taxes, they'll understand
other than making it easier on people, its only once a year so if its not broken why change it
-- The box said Windows 2000 or better... so I installed Linux
You work in the private sector -- where a CTO's responsibility is to implement the new technology and deliver results.
I can guarantee you that actually completing a project is not the goal of any government CTO.
In the public sector, the longer a project takes, the more favorable contracts can be handed out to friends and people from whom political favors can be extracted in the future. The more favors you're owed, the more power you have. The more power you have, the more people you can hire, the bigger your budget, and the more people who owe you favors.
If your goal is to decrease cost and increase customer service because there's competition that's ready, willing, and able to take customer dollars out of your pockets, those are bugs, not features.
If your goal is to increase cost and decrease customer service because there is no competition -- and the only way to get more dollars into your pocket is to increase your power, these are features, not bugs.
In brief: Government - working according to the parameters listed in its functional specification.
Privatization has the potential to put a huge dent in big government and save taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, certain people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
The relatively small number of people or institutions that benefit from a program, including federal employees and their unions, businesses that supply the program, and the communities in which buildings and operations are located always fight to preserve it.
The important thing is to get people to realize the wasteful nature of self-run government programs and overcome this opposition. For example, opposition to privatization could be significantly reduced by providing government workers and managers with shares of stock in the new private enterprise, either at a discounted price or at no cost at all. Generous severance packages and no-layoff policies also can diminish opposition among employees whose programs are privatization targets.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
keep them in the dark ages
IRS's nearly failed $8 billion modernization attempt
So, the IRS can't manage money? Then why are we giving our taxes to them?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
I figured the IRS would be the organization collecting the taxes.
But what the heck is CIO?
If it 'nearly failed', doesn't that mean it still succeeded?
How does a 'nearly failed' attempt to modernize the IRS still run code from 1962?
I doubt there was anything 'nearly' about it. Looks like they spent 8.2 billion, adjusted expectations, and called the project a success (or a 'near failure').
CSC was the prime contractor; they built a 12-story building across the street from one of their big DC datacenters with over 1000 people in it, and surrounding offices. Have their own stop on the Orange train line.
And about one in one hundred did jack crap. It was a complete pig trough. I was a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub contractor, working for a company with 5 employees.
What do you mean you don't have a record of my tax payment? I already....*cough* paid it!
person: what's that?
nerd: it's an old apple, i use it to hack gov. servers, because nothing else is compatible
I don't know what the current process is, but around 1998 or so, I did some support work for a data entry firm, and I noticed that the job they were doing at that time were federal income taxes.
Specifically, they were reading tax forms off of microfiche and entering the data off of them.
So, the IRS has: paid time and materials to have tax forms photographed and developed onto microfiche, paid to ship said microfiche reels to data entry firms, and then contracted with those firms to enter the data in computerized form, presumably before even processing the returns (I suppose they could have been 'old' taxes that had been processed by hand and then recorded digitally for archival purposes, but still...).
Yikes.
You would really have expected a certain degree of accountability at the IRS, wouldn't you... sheesh!
It fails to point out that, like so many other replacements of vintage systems, the new system will likely not work properly for the first five years after implementation. That's if it ever works properly. That's after it's been delayed for years and run costs through the roof. The users will hate it because it is something different that they have to learn and it won't work properly half the time. Plus, it's slower than the old system even though it is running on hardware that is 400,000 times as powerful as the original hardware.
I see this every day. Some sales schmuck sells a load of goods. The vendor hires a bunch of programmers and spends years yelling at them to hurry up. Then they finally deliver a crap application that is really a giant leap backwards. But, it's got cool little widgets everywhere and we call it a portal not a web interface. So, instead of realizing that productivity just took a nose-dive because of a crap application management says; we need some new software to automate this and that so that we can get the cost down. And the cycle continues...
That is the single most retarded idea I have heard all day.
cost overruns of over $200 million and four CIO's in seven years
So do they get a big tax write-off this year or what?
*badum ching*
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I like the idea of the Fair Tax with the exception of one element -- the rebate. I don't like the idea of the government sending a check every month. By not taxing necessities it would seem to me that it can done without the rebate.
See, this won't work, because programmers will petition for Mountain Dew and everything at ThinkGeek to be declared a neccesity, teens will demand that Abercrombie & Fitch clothing be considered one as well, I'd say that The History Channel is a neccesity and so my cable bill is tax-free, and so on... :-)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I say we get rid of the IRS all togeather and go with a flat sales tax. It's simple, effective, and reduces administrative costs to manage revenue.
Life is not for the lazy.
YES YES YES! This equates to a distributed computing solution to solve the problem. Each time a person buys something, they pay the sales tax and the cash register does the math at sale time. Hee hee.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Flat Tax?
The time has come to remove the nightmare that is the Internal Revenue Code. Flat taxes would make it IMMESURABLY easier to find Tax Cheats, file taxes, keep records etc.
Here is my plan. Short, simple and effective.
Income x Rate = tax basis - deduction = payment ( negative = 0)
10,000 x 22.5% = 2250 - 8000 = 0
50,000 x 22.5% = 11250 - 8000 = 3250 (6.5% tax)
150,000 x 22.5% = 33750 - 8000 = 25750 (17.2%)
Save tons of time, increasing productivity, lowering operating costs. The people crying the loudest would be the Tax lawyers and accountants. Possibly even the rich (shut up). Lawyers right bad laws, and accountant have a vested interest in keeping things complicated, so they should be bared from this discussion.
In addition, all those that say a tax cut favors the "rich" can all go pound sand. In my system a tax cut favors everyone, except those not paying any, and why should THEY complain about something that doesn't affect them at all?
As it is right now, nobody, not even the IRS is 100% sure what is in the code. If the elections were held on April 16th instead of November, that too would help.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You obviously don't work in Government.
Local and state governments have deadlines just like in the private sector. The only real difference is that we have to deal with a lot more buricratic cr*p.
If any of my projects were 7 years over due, I would expect to get canned, or demoted.
1) Have they referred this kind of waste to the Office of the Inspector General and if not, why not?
2) Are they looking into how Google stores its information, and if not then what is the reason for that?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
dammit lame filter! (nt) means NO TEXT!
I disagree. Aggregated money is aggregated power (which is not democratically legitimated) and there are taxes which should have prevented such excessive aggregation.
10% to the US Government
3% to the RIAA, to pay for the stuff they assume we've pirated in the last year.
3% to the MPAA, to pay for the stuff they assume we've pirated in the last year.
2% to Microsoft, as part of a "super-tough" DoJ settlement for Microsoft's wrongdoing.
2% to Halliburton, for no apparent reason, the government just likes to give them money.
I bet there are at least 1000 people right here on slashdot who could understand it just fine, and wouldn't mind putting a few "exceptions" in the tax code:
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Ok so it is pretty clear that the system is to big to be rebuilt from scratch. Instead of spending another couple billion trying again, why not spend the money to to SMALL INCREMENTAL UPDATES to the system.
... maybe ill try changing the oil.
Hey guys... I cant figure out how to rebuild this car from scratch... hmm
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Just outsource the work to Indian programmers. I mean, if politicians think it's such a boon for the economy, then what's the problem? What could possibly go wrong?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
... All goods considered necessities would be tax-free ...
Who decides what is a necessity/food ? Don't forget, in Louisianna that alcohol/beer is considered a FOOD and is tax free. Then there's the whole napoleonic code etc etc etc..
I personally think we should get rid of the federal income tax. It was implemented to pay for The War, and it was supposed to be revoked afterwards.. but never was. The Constitution and subsequent laws following it were to keep the federal gov't out of our personal lives... and that's all changed in the last 80 years. I now have to pay taxes to a national organization, get a refund from them that is INTEREST free, and can even receive monies from them without ever seeing the face of the person who is giving me the money. Total lack of personal responsibility.
The Federal Gov't taxes the States, and the States tax the people. That's how it was originally setup, and that's what I'd like to see return to our fair land.
the cost of collecting $1 of revenue--45 cents in 2002, the last year for which statistics are available--has not appreciably declined in two decades.
This is completely unfathomable to me. If they cut this number in half, the federal budget would increase by 25%!! Without raising taxes a single penny! The idea that half of the money you pay into the IRS goes simply to maintining their 4 decade old software is insane.
Seems even their circa 1962 code can't deal with more modern features, such as Direct Deposit of refunds.
Case in point: my own refund.
I just got a letter from the IRS yesterday saying "Sorry, we have to mail [you] a paper check because the Routing Transit Number [you] supplied from your account is invalid". I went and pulled out my checkbook, and confirmed that both my checking account number AND my routing number were CORRECT.
Could they have been scanned incorrectly? Possible, but the numbers were written as clearly as if I had typed them.
Could they have been manually re-keyed incorrectly? Don't we have SOFTWARE to prevent that? Oh, wait, this code was written in 1962.
Worse yet, when I called IRS to complain, the lady on the other end of the line didn't seem to know what a Routing Transit Number was. Arrgh.
There needs to be a cure for Incredible Rampant Stupidity.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Unless caught breaking the law or ignoring the many warnings from your supervisor about "attendance problems," it is impossible to get yourself fired.
If experts have looked at it and determined that it will break, or has a good chance of breaking, then fix it.
If you want more features out of it (i.e. faster), then fix it (or rebuild it from the bottom up).
Apparently neither of these is a big issue right now. When it is, it will get fixed. Until then, business as usual.
It sounds good until you realize that any whose income was over a certain amount would be unwilling to pay that much. Tax on $100,000 comes out to $20,000. Very few people who earn that much want to pay that much, so loopholes would be created or discovered.
Not to mention the many sources of "income". Corporations sit in a special class as far as taxation of their income. Income from stocks and bonds is earned from things purchased with already taxed money. And so on, and so forth.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Ironic how the IRS itself needs auditing!!
Maybe, to get an acutal working system after the billions spent, taxpayers should scare the IRS employees responsible the same way when they audit people. That should get action done!
it says in the article that it costs 45 cents to collect one dollar, to quote:
..."
"Meanwhile, the cost of collecting $1 of revenue-45 cents in 2002
WTF? What's the total tax revenue from IRS last year? Say a trillion dollars. Is the article really claiming that it cost 450 billion dollars to collect that??!
That's just absurd. Please somebody explain the truth to me here.
Is that the IRS DBase that Trinity cracked?
I think all of your hyping of open sourcing the tax infrastructure is missing the the most important point...
are they hiring?
If it could... it could do something like delete the database.... no database means they have no way of knowing if you paid for the last 10 years or so
Hmmmm ... what to do, what to do ... Stretch out the job and the paycheck, and hope the antiquated system fails catastrophically, or make an honest effort to get the new system on line before that happens?
Of course, I'm sure that has nothing to do with the current difficulties. Seriously.
[1] In the U.S., tax returns (complete with check) are due on 15 April.
See what I've been reading.
At least $200 billion per year.
5.8 billion person-hours in 2002 - the equivalent to the entire labor of a city of 2.7 million people.
> Income: xxxxxx
> x 0.20
> Tax owed: xxx
The question is "how do you define income" -- at which point we're back to square one. Capital gains? Dividends? Revenue from your business? Or profits? If profits -- how do you handle the deduction of your legitimate business expenses? What expenses are legitimate and what expenses aren't? That yacht you bought to entertain your guests? The hamburger you bought when you were interviewing your first employee?
I believe that taxing consumption, not income, allows for a less complex system.
If I had to "patch" the US Internal Revenue Code, I'd:
1. Abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax. One tax code is enough.
2. Eliminate holding periods such as the one-year holding period to differentiate a "short-term" capital gain versus a "long-term" capital gain, and the "30 days, not necessarily consecutive, during the 60 days surrounding the ex-dividend date" used to determine whether dividends are "qualified" or "unqualified" dividends, and the 2-year rule on principal residences. Eliminating these arbitrary time periods and the differential tax rates they cause throughout dozens of forms would eliminate *hundreds* of lines of calculations that deal with the intersection of these arbitrary time periods, Section 1250 contracts, and the myriads of "wash sale", "straddle" and "constructive sale" rules, etc etc etc.
3. Eliminate phaseouts. There's nothing dumber than going through the entire year assuming you get a $5000 deduction, only to find out that the $5000 deduction is "phased out" by $0.25 for every dollar over $32,767 that you made, until $49,152. (Unless you're an Albino Sheep, in which case you have the Albino Sheep Allowance of $6000, phased out by $0.52 for every dollar over $39,152 to $42,767.) If you must have progressivity or social engineering measures in the tax code, make 'em all-or-nothing.
4. Tax employment income, interest income, dividend income, and capital gains income at the same flat rate. (Double taxation on dividends could be prevented under such a scheme by providing full deductibility for corporations that issue dividends. My personal opinion is that because investments are purchased with after-tax dollars, the only morally-justifiable tax rate on investment income - interest, dividends, or capital gains - is zero. But in this post, I'm talking about how I'd patch the existing Internal Revenue Code so as not to be so fucking confusing, not to make it "right".)
5. Scrap the motherfucker. And replace it with a consumption-based tax. But since #5 isn't gonna happen - ever - I'll vote for any ruler who includes any of #1 through #4 in his platform.
From the article, It cost 45 cents to process every dollar comming in. This number has been the same for over 20 years.
This is BS...We work more than a third of our lives for taxes and they have the efficiency of a MBA on a Winblows system. Come on, get with the system.
The problem with sales tax is that it is very regressive. That is poor people are excessively burdened by it. I agree the tax code is over-complex but a flat sales tax would not be a good solution.
STOP ROCK VIDEO
$200m is 1/40th of $8B. i wouldn't consider a 2.5% budget overrun headline worthy. of course, i guess it sounds like alot, so i'm supposed to be *shocked*
i just hope the IRS checked CPAN for an IRS module before they started
While that is somewhat true, there is nothing preventing your supervisor from transferring you to crappy jobs so YOU would want to quit.
And the DoD at least is moving to a system where it will be easier to fire federal employees (thanks rumsfeld! I'm sure that'll work just as well as your light, technologically advanced military is working in iraq)
mysql plus a little php.
i can have it done by the weekend.
Seriously. This is something everyone agrees with, but nobody cares or does anything about it. It's just too complicated.
I interned at a company that made routers[1], and one of the big customers was the IRS. All the engineers joked that they wished they had known in advance so they could put backdoors in. Of course we didn't actually know the data formats (and at the datarates were are talking about, capturing isn't exactly feasible...) so it couldn't be done, but trust me, if you ever find that your code is being used by the IRS you too will be joking that you should have put a backdoor in.
[1]Router in the sense that one of the optional modules you could buy was support for this protocol that a few academics were using called IP. Nobody in the real world used it at the time, as the mainframe didn't support it. Soon after IPX (Novel) came to dominate the market for routers, latter replaced by IP.
in my private sector, i let my girfriend fondle me, not some government employee, unless my girlfriend were a government employee. then it'd be strictly professional bureaucracy.
... why we should we tax the rich more then we tax the middle/poor? My limited understanding of the history of taxes is that they are there for "payment" of services rendered. AKA police, military, courts, ect... So do the rich use these services more then the rest of us? I think that before we fix the current tax situation, we need to look at what the taxes are being spent on. I for one am tired of hearing about things like 8 billion modernation attempts.
I have always liked that plan myself. Punish the pissing away of money instead of people's hard work. Some might say that this will cause people to sit on money instead of spending it and stimulating the economy, but I don't think so. People do not have self restraint. You could double the price of all luxury items and people will still buy. They'll buy shit that they don't need even if they have to skimp on the kid's vitamins or school clothes. The simplified tax collecting will save a ton of money, and I say just give it to the ex-IRS workers as a severance or use it to pay for something that helps the country instead of all of the blood sucking. Tax attorneys and accounts can help the new small businesses that will be started. The lack of income tax bureaucracy will probably make small business startups more affordable. Whatever the downside is, it can't be as bad as the current system.
Give me a few billion dollars and I'll hire some dudes in India, Russia, China, etc to get the job done. Pocket 70% of the money and spend 30% of the outsourcing. Isn't that the american way?
is to scrap the tax code along with the source code. And that means scrapping the IRS as well.
The benefits are twofold:
1. They'll fuck it up and nobody will have to pay any taxes at all (thus by "Dubya logic" the economy will take off like crazy)
2. It'll be much cheaper overall to fuck this up. No $200M budget overruns
D McBride
Of course they all look alike to me...
Linux Box + MySQL + Perl
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
there are taxes which should have prevented such excessive aggregation
That's a bunch of BS. Taxes should NOT be to prevent someone from getting rich.
In soviet russia, crappy job quits you!
No one would trust that much data, especially important data, to MySQL.
Perl would probably work, but there are better solutions.
From my professor...
"In order to write a good algorithm that can solve a problem, you must be able to solve it yourself."
How would you expect a computer knows how to file return when some people in IRS don't even know how?
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Oh really. Well then why is Halliburton ripping off the american tax payers. The only time privatization helps is when there is direct and frequent competition.
Privatization has been a very mixed bag. If you make an objective review of the history of privatization you'll see that it has yielded very mixed results. And privatization does not prevent corruption or incompetitence.
The above post is cynical nonsense. As a specific example, the IRS has reduced form-mailing costs by tens of millions of dollars by making PDF forms available for free via anonymous ftp. Is that a waste of taxpayer money?
As for handing our favors, the semi-crooks that foisted a similar failed project on the California DMV are now facing jail time.
More likely in the IRS's case, if Congress tells the IRS to use 1962 technology and hire idiot slacker consultants, then 1962 technology will be used and idiot slacker consultants will be hired. But the pork and the cronyism comes from Congress, via laws and regulations that, currently, are legal.
My wife works in the federal government: in the last five years they have fired their in house IT workers and hired them back as slacker consultants, fired the slacker consultants and hired them back as in house IT people, and now they are laying off the in house IT people and hiring another gang of slacker consultants. I'd rather have my eyes gouged out with a spoon than deal with that kind of turnover..
Note the references to unclear goals and communication issues, lack of buy-in from internal staff, the assumption that the IRS team could have a thin team to work with CSC.... It doesn't seem the IRS learned from their past failures either. The article reads like a list of project management don'ts.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I've hired a number of computer people and it's really hard to find great people who want to put up with government work. The dotcom bust has been great for hiring.
I put up with the red tape and piles of legislative rules, because I feel the research we do is worth it.
I make a decent living, but I know I'll never with the stock option lottery. Which sucks for you too, because if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be writing free software. Luckily, my employer allows me to submit patches to the packages I use.
To sum it up: If government jobs are so great, why do so few qualified people apply to our opennings.
Wow! I've never seen anyone censor the word "crop" before. Are you part of some anti-farming political party? Or do you come from Texas?
The IRS's budget is NOT 1.1 trillion dollars. It's about 10 billion. "Defense" is the biggest piece of revenue, and it's officially around 450 billion. Disclaimer: I used to work at IRS, on the Modernization project.
I've seen that exact same thing-- IT folks clinging to outmoded tech simply because that's all they know, and are too tired and/or lazy to learn something new.
But, I've witnessed exactly the opposite problem, too, or perhaps the exact same problem with an outsourced project.
My wife works at a nonprofit that does management of the federal Welfare To Work Program. The state (AK) installed a "wonderful" database system using all the latest and greatest tech-- based almost entirely on MS products. I mention this because I think it is relevant.
The system sucks so hard, it blows. It is constantly down, data is lost with no real explanation ("The broker crashed," is a common refrain), it is difficult to use, and it sometimes returns incorrect results. There is a multi-hour lag time between data entry and data availability.
Here's my theory: it was designed by people who think they are programmers because they can use MS Visual Studio to create a front-end to an application designed with MS-Access (deployed on MS SQL Server).
One of the downsides of the vaunted MS "ease-of-use" is the proliferation of half-assed coders who think they are hot, who have managed to ignore 50 years of history and knowledge, and are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again.
I think this is worse than the aging IT folks who hide in government buearocracy, polishing and defending their niche until it both shines and cannot be assaulted. I would rather have old technology that works than new technology that is so misused or intrinsically faulty that it just barely works, and that's "good enough."
But then again, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Hey, I'm canadian, so I don't know the US Constitution, but a little googling turns up this:
U.S. Constitution: Sixth Amendment
Sixth Amendment - Rights of Accused in Criminal Prosecutions
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Doesn't seem very related to me.
Ah.
So.
That does explain why I most often met with diapproval from gov't COTRs when I delivered working product, on time, at or under budget, debugged and tested and ready to go into their vetting for production use.
Ha.
I did a thing on IRS IT modernization in college in the mid-90s, and it was about the same story back then. Nothing new, really. Any company that actually manages to modernize the IRS deserves a $20 billion fee.
Of course we could just abolish the IRS and solve the problem rather cheaply.
yeah, I know.... a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money
Outsource it to India, baby!
The big problem is that the politicians tend to make new rules for education loans every second year or so. Then, the system needs to be reprogrammed. Then, you need that COBOL programmer again. And that costs money.
So now they are getting a new solution. It's going to cost a lot. I'm not sure, but I think it was about $80M. That's a lot in Norway. For instance, you could give all secondary-school students free books for that kind of money (they pay it themselves now).
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Unti his retirement, my father worked for the same corporation since 1964; he was heavily involved in the creation of their in-house mainframe accounting system at the time.
In the mid-90s, they attempted to switch over to a new and modern accounting package, the same kind that the corporation I was working for (in the same business) was in the process of implementing.
Within a year, his company had given up, and reverted back to the software that he had written in the late sixties. My company, on the other hand, pressed on for a few more years before giving up the ghost and starting over with another software package.
Yeah -- privatize. They did that with online payments and now I have to pay a nasty fee to pay taxes online. Great job. I'll mail you the check, thanks. Oh, that's return reciept requested, you jerks.
Can you imagine what they would be able to do if they had all the latest and greatest technology? People are already scared of IRS audits as it is. If they were actually efficient they could theoretically do a lot more of those.
/. about how all of the state governments are tieing into each other's (and I would suppose the IRS' too) databases?
What about that story the other day on
No, me thinks it's best to keep the IRS a bit slow.
You think I'd post this kind of message any other way than anonymously? And risk an audit? No Way.
I have heard and read several high profile tax experts voice the opinion that the flat tax is a pipe dream
In a nutshell: members of the house and senate ( & even the president ) use tax distribution as leverage in election years.
Besides think of all the foriegners who H&R block outsource too who will be out of work if doing tax returns becomes simple.
Here's one thing I've noticed about this project, and the one the FAA is going though. No one starts small, gets that working, then gradually work their way up, and across. It's always let's tackle the whole thing.
My Bad.
Need more sleep before posting.
5% for essentials, food, housing.
10% for less essential categories.
20% for luxuries.
Or instead of taxing labour with an income tax or consumption with a sales tax. How about taxing non renewable energy use.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I know the temptation is to solve this as a software problem, but it's really a tax-code problem. A drastic simplification of the tax code would make the IRS much more efficient, make cheating nearly impossible, and would give people confidence that the system was actually fair.
The whole thing should be so simple that it can run on a $1000 pc (with a large storage array, obviously).
Amazing magic tricks
...when most people still keep their tax receipts in shoeboxes?
and the Ayn Rand institute...
"Those familiar with the Master File say it is poised for a fatal crash that would shut the government down."
Well, if it's been running essentially the same code for over forty years (with tax law changes probably every year), that has to say *something* for its reliability.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
How about we all just trade our right to vote for the responsiblity to pay taxes? No one votes, and not like it matters, anyway, so it's only a gain for us.
I believe the parent is strictly referring to federal government. State and local governments have to balance their budgets and make ends meet. The federal government doesn't. I'm on a project now for a Big Agency (agency head is cabinet level) that has been going on for over 20 years through at least 3 different contractors just since the web became important (late 90's, to them). We are 18 months behind schedule and all we have produced is a glorified address book and the beginnings of a framework for managing a small part of the rest of their business.
Our team is not incompetent. Put this group of 20 programmer/analysts, a half dozen business analysts, 4 really strong data wizards and assorted support staff in a commercial environment and I we could kick out some solid systems on time and within stone-throwing distance of the budget.
The business processes we are replacing are fairly complex in the rules, primarily because the rules change every year and we are supporting data and rules going back 50+ years. That is not the problem. A significant part of the problem (and I freely admit we have made more than our fair share of mistakes on this as well) is that the half dozen different departments within the agency are all using the project as a tool to increase their political power and to screw the other departments. That is the one and only goal.
I'm not at all surprised by what happened at the IRS. I'm surprised it isn't worse.
You know I'm sitting here and wondering why corporations and governments "hardwire" that kind of stuff in? Why not bring that part out, and make it easy? Or at the least use a language that lends itself to easy "on the fly" changes.
Is that a synonym for successful?
...that the current system does not benefit the rich and the crooks??
If so, which rock have you been hiding under for the past century?
Your criticism, just like all the people whining about how the flat tax is regressive (not possible), and nit-picking about the definition of 'income' and the like fail to realize that the exact same problems exist in the current tax code, often with greater frequency.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
That pesky $200 million "cost over-run"
would only have been about $45.76 U.S. Dollars
Oh yeah, privatisation works a treat. It's not like the government is going to give the contract to a campaign contributor, or anything corrupt like that.
Nor will the government hesitate to farm the task out on a limited-term contract, so that when that contract expires, a new contractor has to re-engineer a solution from scratch and port all the previous schlub's data to it. That's what I call *efficient*!
The meaning of the acronym CIO in the context of the IRS is explained here (from the horses mouth): IRS Manual - description of the responsibilities of the CIO
They can outsource the modernization and the data migration to India. And make sure they're trained by the people in the "train your own replacement" thread. By the time the dust settles, there won't BE an IRS...
What?!? I didn't know they shared codebases w/ Microsoft!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So far as I'm concerned, the IRS ought to be forced to use abacuses. With their left hands. Whilst wearing padded gloves.
That may help to explain why the IRS is missing a few things - like getting tax revenue from Hollywood.
I did contracting work for the USDA for a while. There were a lot of bad government employees, but I thought most were pretty good. The real problem was the independent contract companies (like the one I worked for). They were only interested in billing hours, not in quality of work. The goverment depended on these companies to give them good advice. That advice usually slanted to what every would bill the most hours.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Not by internet, not by phone. Overburden the IRS with the most archaic, burdensome chores--shuffling papers, keying in data--at every level. These sons of bitches are the enemy, or at least the frontline troops of the enemy. We will never get a fairer, more rational tax system if you help them shear sheep.
It is very simple...
Hire two teams to produce the results...
The first to come with the project complete... earns it's pay...
Same reason why even very hungry people won't take food stamps: pride.
Sorry, but there's a belief among the general populace, and the coding community in particular, that you don't live off the government.
Additionally, the fact that you deal with bureaucracy puts a serious asterix against any and all research that you might be doing.
1. gets rid of the IRS
2. no more filing taxes
3. get a monthly check for basic necessities
4. encourages saving
fairtax.org
One major reason why the IRS can't update their technology is that the US Tax Code fills more volumes than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. There's more lines of instructions in the friggin law than there is running the Space Shuttle.
Many of those instructions conflict and contradict each other. It is impossible to computerize instructions like that. Can't be done. No way, no hope, no chance.
But why should this be a problem? Perfect opportunity to introduce a FLAT TAX. Everybody pays some percentage of their annual income, like maybe 5%, no exceptions and no deductions. Make the income cutoff at $30,000 or something like that.
SHAZAM, no more problem! The government gets the money it needs, because by reducing the 45 cents on the dollar cost of tax collection to somewhere around 5 cents (do you belive that? 45 fucking cents! And they say the military is expensive!) they more than make up for any reduction in the tax rate.
Plus they can fire half the IRS in one go. That's a goal to work toward! Yeehaw! Problem solved, next up, the INS.
Whoops, hit 'enter' instead of 'tab' there.
But, here's a good idea.
Feds can say 'everyone gets x% tax based on $xx,xxx income'
States all add on top of that, whatever they come up with for their own.
Even IF the code isn't cut down...it's still reduced to ONE form.
Now, we *could* use some REFORM as in:
-Reduction in laws
-closing of loopholes (some, mainly those abused by rich/thieves/evaders)
NOT as in:
-getting to one simple system (maybe base it on that)
but we do need to reduce the complexity. When a required government service/tax has a large percentage of the US paying someone to fill it out for them because it's too complex (mainly businesses) then there's maybe something wrong.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Sure, there are good employees in government. But, it's not the good ones that get promoted. Promotions in government are political.
And the contractors are smart enough to have figured out that they don't work for the smart government employees. They work for the politically promoted managers. That means if they don't forget to bring Krispy Kremes for the entire office, they can jack off in their cube all day long.
Like any organization, when it's in bad shape, the fingers should be pointing at the management.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
there's a reassessment going on in town this year. land tax will be paid on the reassessed value, which is looking like it's going to be about half again as much as before (real estate values have shot up around here lately). wo while i may not pay tax on the appreciation of my house as *income*, i most certainly do pay some sort of tax on it.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
My God. If the IRS was competent at its job of collecting revenue, we could lower our taxes by one-third without cutting a single government program. Why isn't this on the front page of most major newspapers?!
Bribery doesn't seem to be a great way to kick off a new efficient blah blah privately run government service. Though it is in keeping with tradition.
In any case, I don't really understand why you'd want to outsource any more of government. You've been doing it with Congress and the Senate with (theoretically) very tough contract reviews every couple of years and no one seems terribly happy with the results so far.
Better idea. Scrap it, top to bottom, stop throwing good money after bad. Much cheaper and more effective. Shrink government down to manageable size,following constitutional guidelines, go back to excise taxes for funding like we had for a LONG time, switch from the erroneously named "free trade" to "fair trade" with quid pro quo tariffs at the borders.
No way, no how, never - ever was the federal government designed or intended to be the out of control monstrosity it has become today.
It's broke. It's breaking us. It's an out of control raging monster. It's hideous. Lose it. Start with the IRS and the "federal" reserve "debt = wealth" congame scams, ashcan them. Work from there. Trying to fix it is like pouring oil into an engine with all bad rings, shot valve guides and every gasket blown and leaking-it's just stoopid.
Amazingly, CSC's stock price has climbed from about $29/share a year ago to about $43, in the face of seemingly horrible publicity. Seems like the piling on mentioned above hasn't really hurt the company's bottom line; after all, CSC's main business is reselling IT workers' time (at a markup) to the government. CSC's performance on this project is certainly not inspiring (they appear quite incompetent), but as long as they don't actually lose the contract, the money will keep rolling in (until the caps kick in), and the stock analysts will probably be pretty happy. It is a huge project.
Because they're usually entry level, at lease at the agency I work for. They want fresh outs right out of college and they only want to pay them $25k/year. I was making double that as contractor at the agency right out of college. So basically, why would I want to take a huge pay cut?
How much could be saved by eliminating the federal government entirely?
Income: xxxxxx
x 0%
Tax owed [sic]: 0
Look at what the welfare/warfare state is doing right now, and ask yourself what value you're getting for your money.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/shadow.html
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
If the tax code got simple, there would be a lot of people outside of government looking for jobs.
Congratulations, you've just invented the graduated tax!
Read, L
You're more correct than you realize. Saving, rather than consumption, is the engine that creates capital production and economic growth. More importantly, it's the only thing that can.
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
This is a classic example of what happens when a company refuses to upgrade due to cost, fear to migrate to more modern systems, or just due to laziness and the fact that its easier to patch and paste your legacy system.
Patch and paste can work ok but the big question is for how long? Before you know it, your so behind the times that upgrading becomes a nightmare.
Fellow Americans, help abolish the IRS under the guidelines of H.R. 25 (currently making its way through the House). This will repeal the 16th ammendment and implement the Fair Tax. The bill has made it through the House before, but died in the Senate. Be sure to call your senators and tell them to make sure the bill gets passed once it hits the senate floor.
The new government tax entity can start from scratch with their information systems, and all of the IRS records can go to the archives. There's no reason why American tax dollars should be wasted on trying to save the dying IRS dinosaur when it can be replaced with a more sensible solution for a mere fraction of the cost.
Call/write your elected representatives up on the hill and tell them you're tired of this craphole of an economy AND tired of the ridiculous way taxes are collected. Tell them to support H.R. 25 or they can kiss your vote goodbye.
Imagine it... no more individual (or joint if you're married) tax forms to fill out... no more audits... economy would probably shoot through the roof... more jobs... more U.S. exports... the benefits are seemingly endless unless you're one of those tax-avoiding million/billionaires who manage to fly under the IRS radar.
For more info on the Fair Tax, visit http://www.fairtax.org/ or check out the brochure at http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/pdf/BROCHURE.pdf.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
ld b,a
ld c,$1f
ld a,(hl)
cp c
jp z,refresh_data
push bc
inc hl
ld b,(hl)
inc hl
push hl
ld l,b
ld b,a
or c
rlca
rlca
rlca
ld h,a
ld a,b
and c
add a,3
(code blatently stolen from "ate" available on ticalc.org)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I don't pay taxes!
Have a nice day, Commissioner!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
There seems to be a big bias in our political culture against people of modest means accumulating any kind of money through control over personal spending and saving. There is a concern about wealthy people controlling all of the resources of the society by making it easy for those fortunate enough to even have a small surplus over their spending to accumulate wealth -- the kind of Huey Long concern. People at the top have access to financial advise, tax planning, and investment opportunities that one can only dream of, but people in the middle get hosed.
Exhibit A is the advice for people of modest means to put savings into the stock market. Traditionally the stock market was a high risk undertaking for the very wealthy with money to burn. In the 1920's, mass ownership of stock caught on and then people got burned in a bubble collapse. A cornerstone of Depression era economics policy was Federal savings deposit insurance -- the idea was for people of modest means to have a low earnings but secure place to save money, and it wasn't in the stock market.
Well, combine the 1970's and early 1980's inflation with regulated interest rates and taxation of savings interest and you had a negative rate of return -- your savings just kind of evaporated for being there. So first there was the money market mutual fund and then the stock market mutual funds as the answer to middle class savings.
And then there was tax sheltered savings in IRA's, only they put in a phaseout on the IRA contribution, followed with the Roth IRA, which inverted the role of principal and earnings in terms of what was taxed, only that had a steep phaseout (actually an income cap), oh, and we are allowed to have tax-sheltered savings in 401K plans, only a good part of your earnings are paying an insurance premium to some pirate, and some 401K's have proven to be scams (can you say Enron? I knew you could!).
Oh, and the answer to health insurance for the self-employed is the Medical Savings Account, which is another scam^H^H^H^H where you are allowed to save money if it is for some sanctioned purpose and is done in some restricted way.
I guess we are really afraid of giving people the liberty to save money. People who have any kind of surplus over what they earn are suspect because apparently everyone from SSI recipients to Michael Jackson are spending every penny they receive and then more on top of it. From the principal of compound interest, even modest levels of saving in a minority of people can create great disparities in wealth, hence the need for inflation, low savings interest rates, and taxation of interest earnings to keep such people in line. And apparently our economy is one big Keynsian bubble -- if people stopped living beyond their means and buying on credit apparently the whole economy would crater.
With savings there comes moral principles of self-reliance and disciplined appetites. One can save enough money for your eventual nursing home stay without having to go on Medicaid. One can have that fancy car but one has to plan ahead for it. With the war on savings, one can have one's fancy car, but one has to be on a credit treadmill, one can have that college education, but one must be a financial assistance supplicant, one can be treated in a nursing home, but one must receive Medicaid assistance. One can "save" money too, but only if for sanctioned purposes and by participating in the correct program.
I say the problem is not the taxing of earned income but all the restrictions on what one can do with that earned income that follow from this great fear of income inequality is the heart of the problem.
On kind of a side note:
If it's old enough and the original coders were bad enough, it might actually be one file.
Just the thought of my taxes getting processed with 1962 equivalents of sed, awk, and grep makes me shudder.
Local and state governments have deadlines just like in the private sector. The only real difference is that we have to deal with a lot more buricratic cr*p. If any of my projects were 7 years over due, I would expect to get canned, or demoted.
Yes, but none of your projects are giant agency-defining cash sinks. The smaller projects, the details of the organization, they get done. The large, sweeping stuff doesn't; and yes I'm saying that from personal experience.
NO CARRIER
The lowest marginal tax rate (federal, including Social Security and Medicare) is about 28%. Overall, taxes make up between 20% and 25% of national income, so effective taxes (the majority of which are paid by the "rich") are lower than even the lowest marginal rate.
Special rates on capital gains, tax free interest, foundations, etc. leave those who invest (the ones who pay the least under a consumption tax) also paying the least under the current system.
I used to be a techie in Baltimore but after moving to Portland, OR and looking for months for another tech position I ended up taking a customer service postion with the IRS.
;)
I work on the toll free help line for individual tax issues and I use the IRS system on a daily basis.
There are 2 parts to the user interface: IDRS (Integrated Data Retrieval System) and ICP (Integrated Case Processing).
IDRS is the main text based interface to the database.
ICP is a recent addtion to the system. It is a basic GUI which helps users enter command codes, switches and definers in the proper format.
There are several hundred command codes.
I use a couple of dozen on a regular basis.
The system has proven to be pretty stable but it does go down occasionally.
It does become inaccessible during the last week of the year so updates can be made in preparation for the new filing season.
The first few weeks in January are called dead cycles.
During this time, many of the command codes are taken offline so further maintenance can be done to the system.
Our desktops run Windows NT 4.0
Until January of this year, each of the ten service centers maintained a separate database.
Each of the call sites was assigned to a service center.
When data is entered or changes are made to accounts, it is first recorded to the service center database. Every two weeks, tapes of the changes made in the databases are flown to the central computing center in Martinsburg, WV where they are all integrated into a central database.
This made research exceedingly tedious.
If a taxpayer (TP) called in with a problem, you would need to check each of the active databases to find out what was going on.
If changes were made to multiple databases, error conditions would occur when the changes were consolidated with the master database.
In January, the service center databases were eliminated for individual tax accounts and we now access the master database directly which eliminates a lot of issues.
This was all done within the confines of the existing system.
There is some progress being made but it is certainly nowhere near being a user friendly system.
It takes quite a while to learn the commands and how to format them properly.
There is a 600+ page manual updated annually which helps you to interpret the information presented in IDRS.
Everything is presented as a numerical code.
For instance a refund being issued is designated with transaction code 846. Another subcode tells you if the refund is a direct deposit or a check. The date on the code is not the actual date the refund is scheduled to go out. To figure that you subtract 10 days if it's a direct deposit and 3 days for a check. All refunds are issued on Fridays.
If you are being audited there will be a transaction code 420
To correct errors on an account you enter the appropriate codes and dollar amounts and then it takes about 2 weeks to process,
It shows up as a pending transaction until processing time is up. If you didn't do it right, it'll come back to you as an unpostable transaction in about 30 days or so.
Needless to say this is not convenient for the TP.
Anybody who spends more than five minutes watching someone work with the system will realize that upgrading the system is not a straightforward task.
For those who are wondering how all those tax returns are entered:
They are typed into the database manually by seasonal employees who are paid piecemeal.
S/390 assembly language? (360 then 370, now 390?)
not C, assembly...
Take a look at google groups link to y2 email
1) ran for 3 weeks non-stop every month.
2) was written in S/390 assembly language.
3) had no MVS macros in the source.
4) keeps dates in two digit year/three digit day, packed decimal without the sign nibble. 99365F is stored as 99365 and unaligned.
Item three was the shocker. Since they were getting close to having a monthly job that took longer than a month to run, they squeezed every instruction possible out of the machine. One trick was to assemble the IOS macros and hand tune the macro generated code, keeping values in registers, resequencing instructions, eliminating unnecessary or redundant code.
Item four is a surprise too. They were trading off the time to align and OI a sign against the time to move the data though the channel. Amdahl's Law says that they are doing the right thing.
"One of the downsides of the vaunted MS "ease-of-use" is the proliferation of half-assed coders who think they are hot, who have managed to ignore 50 years of history and knowledge, and are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again."
And they are coming to Linux. Be afraid, be very afraid. Save yourselves, flee to BSD, the HURD, or even AmigaOS. We'll hold them back, while you go to safety. Take the children, they have so much to live for.
The simple fact is that the tax code is intentionally made super complex by politicians on both sides.
This is what makes the IRS's job / computer software so difficult.
The politicians have a vested interest in things being complex because they are able to hide handouts for their 'campaign contributor friends' and punish those that don't give campaign contributions.
This bickering about tax the rich, tax cuts is just a cover-up for the real issue - quality of life.
Quality of life - if we spent 1% less time at all levels, business, government, personal, etc doing taxes, we would have that 1% to make things better, be more productive, be more competitive with India offshoring, etc.
Essentially, consider voting for a candidate that wants to reduce complexity of government.
How about... no. Income is cash money, only.
LOOPHOLE WARNING: If taxes cover only transactions conducted using cash or the equivalent (such as checking account deposits), then watch everybody move to a barter economy: you give us this for free, and we'll give you that for free.
I worked on a TEENY TINY ITSY BITSY sliver of IRS Prime from 2000-2002. For a company other than CSC, and on something totally unrelated to CADE and the IMF (individual master file.) Our work was on-time, on-budget and made a significant impact on collection.
To sum it up: If government jobs are so great, why do so few qualified people apply to our opennings.
Nobody ever said government jobs are great.
They only said that government work has good job security. (And yes, this is generally true.)
The main drawbacks are: poor pay scale, few opportunities for promotion, and a huge amount of bureaucracy.
Use a VAT to tax corporate income. Replace the personal income and wage taxes with a consumption tax (money invested is not taxed until it is pulled out for consumption). The nature of a VAT is to pay tax on *everything* but credit tax already paid (i.e. if you pay $10+VAT for a piece of wood, you get to credit the VAT you paid against the VAT you charge on the bookcase you make from the wood).
A VAT is very hard to game. The only deductible expenses are tax already paid. The biggest concern is using business resources for personal use. Even that can be legislated away; enforcement is just tricky.
Remember, a new system doesn't have to be perfect. Just better than the current system, which is a bizarre and ever changing mix of taxable, partially taxable, and non-taxable items.
Following your logic, public defenders are nothing more than welfare recipients (actually, considering how they get paid, some actually might qualify for food stamps in some states...).
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
People actually expect the government to finish ANYTHING within the budget and on time? This will probably be modded funny, but I don't think I'v ever heard of any major government project from road construction to wars being finished in the amount of time and for the cost they say it will. This is the government we're talking about, it would be bigger news if they had actually been successful.
More explanation please. Also a bit spin please. Will it make the rich poorer/richer ? the poor richer/poorer ? the midclass poorer/richer/larger ?
The software is over 40 years old, and STILL nobody has found a hack for major refund. ;-)
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
Whether working for government or private, I've really noticed that the big difference (as always) is the people.
On either side, good leadership and management makes the difference. Acheivable, measurable goals, assumption testing, milestone markers...it all works together to make success happen.
The IRS was designed by accountants and lawyers. And guess who they screw...anyone who is not an accountant or a lawyer! What a suprise there.
True IRS reform would be changing the system so that the IRS takes money from the individual states, who take the money from us. The IRS would have a insanely simple job...50 payers.
Sure, they would have to do some regulation and monitoring, but this would make a lot more sense to me.
Sorry, but in our beautifull country (germany) you cannot get canned once your a gouvernment employee.
Maybe thats why nothing ever really changes,
and Billions are spent on bullshit here.
we need an "-1 Plain wrong" moderation option!
IRS auditor: "Mr. Simpson, this government computer can process over nine tax returns per
day. Did you really think you could fool it?"
If government jobs are so great, why don't you get one?
Because I want to do something worthwhile with my life.
By the way, nobody in the posts you were replying to said that government jobs were great. They pointed out that they were secure, that it's extremely difficult to fire government employees, even the lazy and incompetent. Great if you're lazy, frustrating if you're a doer. I've never worked for the government but I've worked as a contractor for the government, and seen it from the inside. There are people in govt jobs who work hard, believe that what they are doing is very worthwhile, and really try to do a good job. But they are in a minority, and most of them seem to get disillusioned after a few years. Mostly they stay for the better pension deal and eventually end up like the others.
No, he's right. Government jobs are for mostly for leeches. As one guy said at the gub'mint job I have, it's the 40-60 system. 40% of the people do 60% of the work. I think that's over-estimating the laziness of the common government leech because it's worse than that.
Sure, I've worked for corporations and there's plenty PLENTY of slack off time (just like in Office Space about the 15 minutes of actual work a day), but it's nothing like Gub'mint Work where I've been penalized for working too much. I ignored the first "slow down, you work too much" warning and it nailed me on a review.
You're paid for not working because that's the Magic of The Job. If you can't finish your job, you get a bigger budget.
My 2nd job is at a small company and I'm not paid more in the private company like you said. But I enjoy working there.
And public defenders, and I'm thinking of the one that told my uncle to plead guilty to an armed robbery that even the witnesses said wasn't commited by him, wouldn't do it if they were qualified enough to get a real job.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Here in Belgium only 1% of the company's gets a manual check of their taxes... all the rest is left alone and are not double checked... people who goto work everyday have no chance to fraud on there taxes cause everything is in a computersystem, and that runs well... The system is let the small fish pay for everything and leave the big fishes alone cause they provide jobs and they rule the country... ehrrr world. capitalism everywhere... whats the option? learn to live with less
I don't understand this "45 cents to collect a dollar of revenue" thing. If that were true then the IRS budget would be approximately 1/3 of the federal budget. Clearly this isn't true.
Can anyone resolve this for me?
stay frosty and alert
My brother is out of town on business so I am picking up his mail for him.
Today he got a notice from the Illinois Department of Revenue. You know, the tax guys. I don't know what it is about, all you can see is his name and address through the window in the front of the envelope.
Oh, and his SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER through the front of the envelope. No, not through the window. You can read it through the tracing-paper thin envelope itself.
Hello. It is 2004. Have any of these people heard of identity theft? I write my checks with a special pen that makes it harder to wash the ink off and these guys are shooting SSN's through the mail without so much as a goddamn security envelope?
After seeing this the article on the computer systems doesn't surprise me in the least. Which is either sad, funny or pathetic. I'm not sure which.
We could fix that with a flat tax on ALL income over $25k a year, but that is a different thread all together.
Does that include inherited assets? What if the recipient is under 18? Does that include appreciation? Does depreciation count as negative income? What about taxes people pay overseas? What about money earned overseas? Dual citizens? Deferred earnings? Gifts to relatives?
The flat tax is a red herring. It's as if the additional math of a sliding scale is going to be a tremendous burden to the system. It's not. The system is complicated because of all of the various special cases involved in it. What about the parent who is earning 40k per year, but spending 20k on education for their children? Or the father making 70k but spending 35k on medical bills?
Make no mistake about it, flat taxes are a way that rich people can pay less, period.
Besides, the most byzantine part of the tax code is corporate taxes, which, it was recently revealed, %60 of all corporations don't pay. First of all, unlike people corporations only pay taxes on net income, not gross. So if they didn't earn any money, they don't pay any taxes. Of course, what qualifies as taxable income and taxable expenditures varies. Then you have exemptions and reductions for where you're headquartered, the types of workers you employ, what industry you are in, what kinds of R&D you do, employee training, and about a million other things. Add into that the problem of overseas earnings, and earnings at home from overseas labor. What about earnings passed up from wholly or partially owned subsidiaries? Do they pay twice?
A lot of these corporate special cases are desirable, because they encourage things that you want to encourage. To say that they must all go and be replaced with a "flat tax" is a gross oversimplification. You haven't even defined what a "flat tax" is in a multinational corporation. Is a man in Denmark buying a book on Amazon.uk using an American credit card to an american bank a taxable transaction?
With apologies to Einstein, it would be good to simplify the tax code as much as possible, but no further. The "flat tax" is not applicable to real-world situations, does not directly reference that which makes the tax code complicated, and does not solve the problem.
No disrespect to you or your family intended, but the flat tax is no solution. Personally, I wouldn't mind a total tax rewrite, but I suspect that in the current political climate that would open up a field day for all-new abuses.
The ______ Agenda
A friend of mine works in the Department of Revenue for one of the contiguous 48 states. According to him, because there is no way to differentiate managers according to pay, they differentiate themselves (and therefore, gain power) though the number of people under them. It doesn't matter if they are doing work or not, just that you get as many people as possible and hold on to them.
Work does get done, but generally the size of the team has nothing to do with the work being performed. Hence, things finish far ahead of time and under budget. But, since you don't want your team cut, you just let them run freely for 3/4 of the time. The more wasted time the better, as that means you'll need more workers to do the work.
They did, oddly enough, lock down internet surfing. I guess the infrastructure managers want the implementation managers' budgets.
The ______ Agenda
What are we doing wrong these days that programmers could get right in 1962? Why are we failing at these attempts at modernization, when we know for a fact that software engineering methods have advanced so much since then?
But not fired? Yeah, that sounds *just* like government work.
Just looked at the article's date, which is Apr. 1...
Could it be a "good" april fools day article ?
Get rid of it. One third of all of the individual tax returns gets spent on the IRS' budget. If we were to scrap the IRS and create a federal sales tax (two have been proposed in congress), then the individual burden would be reduced because people with illegal incomes (they usually don't file tax returns) and tourists would all be paying into the federal pile just by buying things. Sticking your money in an offshore bank account wouldn't do any good. The more you spend the more taxes you pay. If this were to happen, however, we would have to make sure we don't do something stupid like keep the income tax AND incorporate a federal sales tax. If your country already does that, no offense intended.
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There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
Does that mean anything?
Or is your IRS really poised on the brink of disaster?
Every country should have at least two governement, so that here is a sane competition. The best governement will get more citizen and more taxes. :)
...we can all pay a flat tax, each paying our fair share and almost completely do away with the IRS.
I've always assumed that the tax code is complicated:
- largely to counteract the schemes of tax evasion specialists (accountants, lawyers, and rich people)
- and possibly to hide/obscure the tax benefits of being rich
Really, the one line where you look in the table of tax rates is the simplest part of our tax forms. The hard part is all these millions of loopholes, forms, caveats, etc, that keep us honest.
"If government jobs are so great, why don't you get one? I'm sure you think you are smart enough to qualify." It's a 'closed shop'. They will hire legions of consultants and put a career civil servant who can't tie his shoes in charge of them rather than hire someone qualified from the outside. The only way to get a govt. job is fresh out of school or military, or to buy it from a politician.
"To sum it up: If government jobs are so great, why do so few qualified people apply to our opennings."
Qualified people apply. You just never see the paperwork. It never makes it through the hiring bureaucracy. Don't believe me? Try applying for one of the positions you are trying to fill. Don't check any of the non-competitive eligibility boxes. Don't say you're a current govt. employee. Don't tell them you're 'reinstatement eligible'. You'll never see the application, even if it's a perfect match to your original request.
See here.
Honestly, how hard and expensive is it to set up banks of scanners and some PDF software?
chuck
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
About a hundred U.S. Reps have already signed on. Might be a good time...
About a hundred U.S. Reps have already signed on. Might be a good time...
> If government jobs are so great, why do so few qualified people apply to our opennings. [sic]
Because government HR systems are antiquated!
I applied for a job at one agency and had to get a login account for three different systems. I never got any confirmation that they had my resume. I also remember getting a rejection postcard for a state government job that I had applied for a year and a half back! I was already a year into a private-sector job by then.
For the record, I worked in state goverment to 2 years...
www.fairtax.org says about a hundred U.S. Reps have already signed on...
But again, it's not confined to the public sector. I saw what you're describing at a power utility - it was well understood that if you worked to supply lucrative business to the outside contractors for 5 - 10 years, then you would be given a cushy job with one of them, but if you allowed the boat to be rocked, you'd be out of the club. Nobody really cares if the projects succeed or fail, as long as truckloads of the (customer's/investor's/taxpayer's) money gets redirected to a holding area where you might personally be able to go pick some of it up later. The only people who get upset are the poor, frustrated fools whose ego demands meaningful accomplishments in a work-related field. Oh, and the honest people, but in this sort of environment the honest people usually departed the scene years or even decades ago.
This happens at power and telecom utilities, financial and insurance institutions, academic and government centers, manufacturing plants, car dealerships - basically anywhere you have people and money.
-Graham
No, no, no! You troll! It costs 45 cents to collect $100 of revenue. Less than one half of one percent is "overhead."
To understand recursion,
you must first understand recursion.
"Master File", huh?
What uses it, the Master Control Program?
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
8 BILLION, with a B, spent with apparently more to come, and this wasn't even the first time "...in 1995, Congress pulled the plug on a second modernization program after the IRS spent 10 years and $2 billion with little to show for it." Granted this is not a department of the government we can afford bugs in. Not that I would mind a surprisingly large return, but if someone misplaces a decimal the wrong way, that could go very badly form some people. "You owe $21,320.00." "DOH!"
My point is this. When the IRS fails to perform, people say "Well what did you expect." When NASA fails people are surprised. Let us spend the $30 billion to try to send people to Mars, and if we fail, we will fail spectacularly. If we succeed, we could inspire the next generation, possibly the entire world, to push farther and ignore the perceived limitations of the human race's ability to adapt, excel, and grow. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the east looking for a shorter route to Asia many people thought it was impossible. Some of his own crew thought they would sail off of the edge of the world, but they set out anyway. Spain paid for his voyage in spite of the perception that it couldn't be done. Whether Columbus was the first westerner to come to the Americas or not, his discovery, for better or worse, lead to a new age of discovery and exploration. Let's do that again...It's time.
I know this has gotten a bit off topic, but it's something to think about.
I read someone like 90% of the US with taxpayer IDs either get deductions (mortgage, childcare, etc) or a government check (social security, dependent children). There are like a dozen for education alone. So immense complexitry makes everyone feel like their getting more from the governement. Just look at each presidential candidate promising more of these.
So may I ask what sort of worthwhile job are you doing now?
I would agree with you in that a CONTRACTOR is not diong anything worthwhile. I've seen plenty arrogant, incompetent contractors who are only out to leech off government money without providing any useful service. The competent ones try to lock the government into their own proprietary applications and try to get long term maintenance contracts out of it.
Yes its frustrating sometimes being a gov employee, but I experienced frustrations in academia and the start up world too. But by far the gov job I'm in now has afforded me a lot more flexibility than even startup jobs, if you are smart enough to work the system.
I'd rather that an "expert" either person or algorithm flag and audit people, then just a random sampling of Joe Minimum wage who isn't going to have a paper trail anyway.
The thing is your elected representatives probaly don't want those things either.
If they do elect some that do.
IMH(and Naive) Opinion, the politicians actually want to help make a good stable country that they, their friends, and family can live in.
Even some rather unpopular leaders can be seen acting in what they think is the best interest of the world, their country, or at least those who vote for them.
Just happens that some of them make bad decisions.
You are absolutely right. In my Job I was outsourced to CSC. (The same CSC in the article) and then offshored. CSC follows the bill more hours principle in the public sector as well.
Somehow, CEO's think outsourcing/offshoring saves money. Unfortunately as they pay more, and more IT people get laid off, no one will be able to afford their products.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
A code is a code is a code. Title 26 of the United States Code contains the federal tax laws of this country. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/ Look at this code like any Operating System plus Legacy Code. It has it's own kernal, directory structure, variables, and commands. See how the variables are used. See how the call-routines work. Keep in mind that certain elements of the power structure (corporate accounting and legal industries) are embedded in the code and have a serious vested interest in keeping it more complex than it needs to be. Similar to how Windows is bloated, so is the tax code of the US. Yet the tax code is in the public domain available to every internet user. Just like the Matrix.