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Computer Foul-up Breaks Canadian Tax Filing System

Posted by samzenpus on from the great-white-mix-up dept.

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."

2 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Data Types by truckaxle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Apparently on Monday they discovered tax fillings submitted electronically where the social insurance number, and the date of birth were swapped."

    Sounds like a serious upfront data validation issue.

    However, those two fields should be of a different types and the insert should fail.
  2. CCRA Messing with their systems at tax time by landoltjp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?