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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."
Incompetence.
It was a change?
Who approved it?
Was it tested?
What was the prepared back-out plan?
Why does the master recovery procedure not work like clockwork?
Qualification: Most databases are already corrupt/have issues, but not showstoppers
I'll make a guess.
1) ETL in there.(Note recovery using ETL is mostly unworkable)
2) There was no production mirror test environment - test environment and data is a sorry joke.
3) Contractors doing the data conversion
4) Database design, edit checks missing
5) Foreign composite keys adding to woes of misery
6) Testing carried out by same contractors with no external walk through/review
As usual, there will be no lessons learned. The usual excuse - prod system is too complex, and too hard to set up a real test environment.
The final prediction: This is ok, we had a risk management strategy - yadda yadda, while threating to take secaters to the culprits fingers after they have have done their one year extension to fix the issues.
I totally agree. If any kind of robust data validation was going on, this should have failed on insert.
Social insurance numbers are always 9 digits, and can be validated by the Luhn Algorithm.
A date of birth wouldn't be 9 digits by any scheme I can think of, especially formatted as 3 groups of 3 digits, and only a very, very few of them wouldn pass a check of this algorithm.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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.
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_
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 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.