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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.
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.
I would expect that anybody who could generate a foulup of this magnitude could do it on pretty much any combination of OS, HW and DB.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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...
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
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.
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!
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 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?
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
Most probably Oracle and MS 2003 servers. The Canadian gov is a total MS and Oracle shop.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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?
"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.