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."

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DST patch broke CRA?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

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