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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."

5 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. They need a thorough audit of their systems. by oSand · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... it's only fair

  2. 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.
    1. Re:Data Types by Bloke+down+the+pub · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.
  3. CCRA by can56 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. DST patch broke CRA? by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.