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Computer Foul-up Breaks Canadian Tax Filing System
CokeJunky writes "During a weekend maintenance window, the Canada Revenue Agency (Fills the same role as the IRS south of the border) experienced data corruption issues in the tax databases. As a precaution, they have disabled all electronic filling services, and paper based returns will be stacking up in the mail room, as returns cannot be filed at all until the problem is fixed. Apparently on Monday they discovered tax fillings submitted electronically where the social insurance number, and the date of birth were swapped."
... it's only fair
Sounds like a serious upfront data validation issue.
However, those two fields should be of a different types and the insert should fail.
Apparently on Monday they discovered tax fillings submitted electronically where the social insurance number, and the date of birth were swapped.
In other words, feel free to write off whatever the hell you want this year, because you officially have plasible deniability.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Party at my place everyone!
PS. I'm going to write everything off as a business expense.
It'd be interesting to know what was the setup that brought to this failure. OS, HW, Application and DB technology involved. I wouldn't want to have the same stuff where I work... ;-)
e
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Has anyone noticed that both instances of the word "filings" have been spelt "fillings"? That mercury-laden amalgam is sure to mess things up electronically :p
As a canukian, I have a few comments on this terrible disaster: The CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) was renamed CCRA (Canada Customs and Revenue Agency) years ago. Makes sense to combine the two departments. A joke about strikes in Canada: Air Canada (our national subsidized air-carrier) goes on stike? Who cares, we'll walk. The Canadian postal workers goe on strike? (usually before Christmas). Great! It means Visa won't be able to find us! The Breweries (Moslon, Labatts, ...) go on strike? Holy Crap!
Rip the furnace out of the basement to make more room, and send
all the vehicles you can muster to the beer store and stock up
for the winter.
In other words, feel free to write off whatever the hell you want this year, because you officially have plausible deniability.
Not quite, according to their update:
(I know, the post was supposed to be funny)
How frickin difficult is it to accept a chunk of data, validate it, and insert it into a database? I bet the guru who pulled off this blunder is f!@#ed for life now!
NEO: So you're Trinity, the one that f!@#ed up the CRA database?
TRINITY: Would you like poutine with your back-bacon sandwich?
I'm sure I'll get a nasty call a couple years from now, with a few thousand dollars in fines attached. They will attempt to convince me it was my fault taht they screwed up my information. How do I know this because I've spent the last 4 years trying to clean up the confusion when they swapped my social insurance number with someone else who happens to have the exact same name.
CRA: "You lied, and put someone else's social insurance number down on your employment record."
me: "Mmmmhmmm, I went and found someone out there with the exact same name, stole their SIN number, and filed a tax returns with that number FOR THREE YEARS just to see if you'd catch me."
CRA: "You're lucky we are only applying financial charges for the trouble."
me: "I claimed every penny I made and I paid full tax on it, and you still want more money?"
CRA: "That is because you provided false identification."
me: "Even though you (apparently) had no record of me being employed anywhere, you audited me every year and approved my tax returns. Now FIVE years after the initial mistake you realize I owe you MORE money?"
CRA: "Our records show that you provided false identification."
Although its nearly impossible to deal with these people, the story does have a happy ending. The government eventually paid me back all of the extra money they had taken from me, no interest mind you, but it's better than nothing. I still find it mind boggling that they audited me every year for three years, and it took them five years to admit that they mixed up their data.
So yes, I expect a call in a few years.
At least I know everyone in the first world probably has to deal with a similar taxation system, that's some comfort. I think I'm really starting to support the fair tax idea...
Well gee, computer programs are made by people and have faults and computers sometimes break and screw up. News at 11pm.
But we can totally rely on an unverifiable election poll counted by computer. Totally, no need to make it verifiable independent of the computers doing the counting.
How long before phishers setup a mirror or three of the Canadian IRS and begin collecting SSNs and birthdates? They'll have the data in the right columns I'm sure. The grammar and spelling on the other hand...
How long must we put up with these computers fouling up our systems? We've been taxing people for hundreds of years with no problems worth mentioning.
Bring back trustworthy, reliable humans and we will have no more of these computer foul-ups.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
I ask because MySQL is notorious for silently accepting data that shouldn't otherwise "fit" into a column. In the case of an SSN being inserted into a date field, it would probably just set the date to "0000-00-00" without the slightest complaint.
According to this reliable source (Canadian Globe and Mail national newspaper), it was a maintenance patch applied on March 4th that broke CRA's (Canada Revenue Agency) website.
Yesterday afternoon, the VP of IT at my company called a 2.5 hour emergency meeting to review our entire DST patch process across all systems to ensure all issues are on track & resolvable - the reason for the emergency meeting? Somebody told him that that CRA glitch was triggered by problematic Microsoft DST (daylight savings time) patches. Our internal MS IT techs confirm, the patches are not exactly simple, or easy to apply and at the last minute some patches have been re-patched or "upgraded" to newer versions, requiring one to uninstall earlier 1.0 patches.
Can anybody site a source that confirms the CRA's glitch was indeed related to DST?
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
...paperless office. Neat concept eh!
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
Just because you've validated the data doesn't mean that you can't store it in the wrong field in the database, especially if both fields are numeric. An 8 digit date will fit into a 9 digit SIN field, and a SIN will fit into a date field if it's one of those "number of seconds since some arbitrary point in time" kind of date fields. However, it sounds from the article that there may be a little more wrong than two swapped fields.
I just hope they get it sorted out before I'm ready to file. I don't want to fill out a paper form. This is the 21st Century after all. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to get a paper form.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I used to work for a brokerage and had to deal with Canadian unit trusts, similar to mutual funds. The way they reported tax info was by submitting a excel file. They often submitted multiple files with conflicting information, it was largely in the wrong format ( which was not validated by the Canadians ), and had conflicting internal information. And they wonder why they have problems. Needless to say, I was shocked with how poorly it was run.
The Canadian Social Insurance Number (SIN) is nine digits long, with the last digit being a check digit (uses IBM's old "12" system). Last time I checked, full dates were eight digits (well, at least for the next 7,992 years they are). Should be an easy matter to flag the corrupted records.
Does this mean that I'm going to get a huge return this year? :)
Does it seem reasonable that I.T. at Revenue Canada would apply code changes at this time unless they were forced to? Generally, the system is only used for a few months of the year. What they are saying doesn't make much sense from the I.T. Operations point of view.
We have change freezes during any busy periods.
Of course, this statement could be influenced by my large refund that was already filed being put on hold and my distaste for tying H.A. systems into Windows boxes. _grin_
More likely the ghost of Mr Wilson...
An 'Old government of Canada' used to defer processing returns until after budget delivery [ especially in election years ] to make its performance look better. A few months later, when the budget had to be restated, nobody was noticing. In 1992 [ Wilsons last kick at the can ] it was billions.
Same tactic, new scapegoat.
My mother works for the CRA, so I hear stories all the time about how they try to do things improperly.
A recent story is about the problems they're having with the change in the DST date.
Essentially, because the CRA is still on Windows 2000 systems they have to patch it themselves. So they write the fix, and then they instruct the accountants to leave their computers on and unsecured at the end of the day so that the IT guys can update their computers. Which means that anyone walking by could potentially have very easy access to any of the information about anyone in the Canadian Tax system, and it would be blamed on the individual whose computer they were using.
On top of that, the IT guys got about a third of the way through these updates before they realized that their patch was flawed and now they've decided to fix the problem with the following three measures:
1) Have people set their appointments an hour off, so as to counteract the time change.
2) When emails are sent they are now requited to post times as EST or EDT. My mother had a woman comment to her, "Like I know what time zone I'm in."
3) Upgrade to XP when they can get a deal from M$ for a cheap enough price.
The DOT is worrying over Vista, and the CRA can't set the clocks on 2000. Sometimes I get worried about things up here.
I can certainly understand why the systems administrators want to keep the CCRA machines in the best state. However, messing with them at this particular time is rather ... well, let's go with skull-crushingly stupid.
Returns from across the country are going to be coming in. hundreds of thousands of returns will come through the online submission systems. Those machines should've been frozen at Christmas. The Bank that I used to work at had a freeze on their, c machines right near (or after) Christmas in preparation for the onslaught of transactions related to RRSP (US-401K) season).ulminating the lat week of February.
I'm not sure when the DST patches came out for the affected machines, but it seems that they would've been more intellegent about when they were applied.
Plus, no fail-over plan? No back up services? (or were they patched at the same time?) no roll-back? Uhm, naw, we'll just shut 'em down. Yes that works. I mean, who would mind?
I would like to thank all the vendors that still have not released their DST patches and the Bush governement.
It did precisely what the analysts and coders told it to do.
But a headline like "Programmer Foul-up Breaks Canadian Tax Filing System" wouldn't be very newsworthy.
A headline like "Programmer Gets Canadian Tax Filing System Just Right" would be newsworthy. And astonishing.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"(Fills the same role as the IRS south of the border)"
Oops, let me turn this map around...
Would you like poutine
Being a US'ian, I am sure that is some kind of Canadian sexual reference.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
...that I got my T4 early and filed my taxes a couple weeks ago.. even got my return last week. :D
- Jimbob
In a few weeks, I bet we see a very interesting posting at The Daily WTF about "John Smith" who worked at the tax agency of "an unspecified industrialized nation"...
I wish people would stop saying things like "The computer screwed up", or "A computer error lost my file". These are people errors - the poor computer is innocent. At some point some carbon based life form gave the computer erroneous instructions, and it was "only following orders".
Life needs more saving throws.
Does that mean that Canada taxes Mexicans? That explains everything!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
But my birthday really is 123-456-789! It's about time they fixed their discriminatory calendar restriction!
This CBC article says that over the weekend they performed 20 maintenance operations that cause this.
Their web site says that they traced the source of the problem to software maintenance conducted on March 4, 2007.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I'm actually impressed this sort of crap doesn't happen more often with the hordes of code imbeciles that have flooded the market in the last decade, a lot of them ending up in government roles or other big businesses, anywhere a lousy coder/admin can easily hide among the crowds. They don't hire many good IT staff because, well, it's hard to tell a good coder from a bad one until they've ruined a few of your projects (or pushed them to a level of greatness that brings tears to your eyes - riiiight).
:P How will this affect those who are expecting some cash back ? The ones who get money back are usually the ones who need it the most, students and low-income families.
I would have expected something like this to be thoroughly tested long before tax season to iron out the kinks, certainly not something to be done at a time when the rate of incoming reports is steadily increasing.. a few days of downtime could backlog them by several weeks, and every Canadian knows how good the gov't is at working through backlogs
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I read that H&R Block is still doing people's returns but just queueing them on their own system.
When CRA is back up H&R will send the backlog. So CRA will get days of traffic in a minute.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
how do you know that there won't be 10,000 months, with 100 days each, or in Europe, the other way 'round?
Forward thinking, I think.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"I just hope they get it sorted out before I'm ready to file. I don't want to fill out a paper form. This is the 21st Century after all. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to get a paper form."
If you don't want to download it from here, then pick up a package at any post office. They've been there every year for at least twenty one years (and probably much longer). You must be very young, new to Canada, or both.
I WANT MY FLIPPING MONEY BACK!
Last year I made nothing more than a decent salary for a network admin but was blessed with ooooooodles of bonuses (boni?, bonuscise?) which had taxes deducted as though it were my regular bi-monthly pay. This has resulted in much greater deductions than necesary and in total I should be receiving a shiny check from the Canadian Government for roughly $9300 CAD. (yes my bonus actually surpassed by wage this year. Not sure how, don't care why, just going to take the money and go somewhere warm for a week or so!)
On an aside, as one of three admins, I 'should' have this unbiased deduction issue in our payroll system corrected but I rather do like the outcome.
Many little surprises throughout the year and one heck of a surprise at year end.
And that is why I have an accountant do my taxes for me, and file them at the last minute... Just squeek by the deadline, and let all the well intentioned folks who file early beta test the system for me...