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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.
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
$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
Why not publish the taxing rules and let someone
throw together a Postgresql/Apache software package?
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
Yeah, and you'd have the most unfair (notice I didn't say inequitable) taxing system ever. What a mess this would be! The poor, who currently pay basically no taxes on their 18K per year suddenly owe $3.600 / year, which is like 4 months rent. The rich making $1million per year owe 200,000, but that doesn't affect them in the least - 800K is still ashitload of money.
We have tax breaks because we want to ENCOURAGE people to get an education and child care, so that they dont have to decide between rent and school.
The whole concept of a universal flat tax is just silly if you think about it for more than 5ns.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Simple solution to that, suggested above. The first $X aren't collected. E.g., the first $5k aren't collected. People who make less than $25k pay no taxes. You're effectively only taxed for what you make over $25k (or whatever arbitrary figure you choose).
The rich making $1million per year owe 200,000, but that doesn't affect them in the least - 800K is still ashitload of money.
That's BS. People who make $1M still notice $200k. It may not hurt them AS MUCH. But it still hurts them.
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.
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.
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.
Although government agencies (bureaucracies) are accountable to nobody, and as a result, the IRS would never support its own downsizing, you've hit at the real root of the problem.
If the Internal Revenue Code weren't so complex, the IRS would be forced to downsize, no matter how hard it screamed for self-preservation.
The revolving-door "in-house"/"contractor"/"in-house" system you describe is symptomatic of bureaucracy. But that bureaucracy wouldn't exist if Congress didn't invent it.
If every Congressman had to do his or her own taxes, with pencil, paper, and 4-function calculator, and with no assistance from anything but the IRS help line, web site, and published forms, the Internal Revenue Code would be fixed within a month.
Unfortunately, the odds of Congressmen having to face the monster they created are zero. As much as I hate the IRS - they're just the guys running the trains and seeing to it that the gold teeth are accounted for. The real villians in the story of high tax compliance costs are the ones who issue the orders that we get into the fucking boxcars.
Better yet, for the ultimate hack, work on this project, doing nothing illegal while you are there, but pay close attention to the code that processes people's tax forms, and look for any buffer overflow bugs in the code that reads the text of the fields on the form (I assume they have some massive OCR system for this, instead of a warehouse full of typists doing it by hand).
F root.exe"
Then, next year, submit a very carefully crafted 1040 form on April 15...
"Hey, this 1040 seems a bit odd. It's from a Mr "John Doe __________akjg908t9(%&@(dasaga9agajda(%(@Q@FAA062
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The article left out two zeros.
The IRS website publishes stats and has an Excel file reporting that in 2002 it took $0.45 to collect $100.
There are many people in the world who would call $18,000 a year -- as you say -- "a shitload of money". Laborers and starving people all over the world who see the incredible wealth all over this country. Then there are all the other countries of the world that pay a MUCH larger tax percentage than most Americans do. Tell them that 20% is too much to pay.
Prosperity is relative, of course. I used to think of "the rich" in a different way than I do now, because I make more money today than I ever thought I would (and I was making more a few years ago). Of course I'm not "rich", which is kind of a silly word. But there are millions of people in this country who believe that I deserve to pay a higher percentage of my income than they do because I don't need mine as much. That's just not true.
We all work hard for what we have -- some harder than others, admittedly -- and out standard of living goes up as our income goes up. Most of us spend about 30% of our income on shelter, about 12% on food, and about 5% on clothing. If you make more money, you can spend more on your shelter, food and clothing. And you can also pay more taxes, but the PERCENTAGE should be the same.
The argument was presented that a guy who makes $16,000 a year shouldn't have to pay $3600 in taxes. Comparing it to 4 months rent was an emotional argument, and I could make the same argument but take it a step further. My total tax for 2003 is roughly equal to 7.5 months of my mortgage payments. How is that fair to me? There are people who honestly think that I have piles of cash sitting around my living room, I guess. Believe me, I don't. I have financial struggles too.
And the guy who makes a million dollars a year? He probably has a $15,000 mortgage payment. You could confront him with that and shame him for living in an expensive house, but you, too, would probably want to live in an expensive house if your hard work made you wealthy (insert here the tired argument about how none of the rich have ever worked hard for anything).
Fortunately, we have a universal law that makes everything fair. It's called math... more specifically, percentages. If everybody pays the same percentage, instant fairness. This won't happen, though, because the majority of Americans don't want to take the subtantial majority of the tax burden away from the "evil rich". It sure it weird for me to suddenly be among them and feel the hate spewing in my general direction. I'm really, honestly, not rich. I'm just trying to keep things rolling the way they are for me, and maybe a little better, just like everybody else.
RP
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.