Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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?
Data types? In my day, all we had was text fields.
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...
Text? Luxury!
We had to convert it to hex in our heads and enter it on paper tape.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What would some Cree fellow have to do with it?
It's been a long time.
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
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?