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Crunch Time For IRS Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "It's crunch time for the Internal Revenue Service. As the IRS processes the annual crescendo of returns around today's tax deadline, the state of the agency's infrastructure depends upon who you ask. IT executives at the IRS say it has made huge strides in modernizing its data centers, which processed 139 million returns and issued $298 billion in refunds in 2009. Independent tests say the IRS web site is the fastest US government site, and one of the fastest on the web. But a key government watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, says the modernization effort hasn't moved quickly enough, and continues to fault the IRS for security weaknesses."
Its crunch time to process their robberies
They won't have much on me, 'cause I don't have a paper trail.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spread out the submission of tax forms throughout the year?
At least from an IT standpoint, you would probably need one tenth the infrastructure
Wherever You Go, There You Are
"I got a little tax problem," Homer Simpson, sotto voce to an IRS agent who proposes he goes undercover to bust Monty Burns. But, apropos, the IRS guy says "this government computer can process over nine tax returns per
day."
processed 139 million returns and issued $298 billion in refunds
The only image in my mind as I read that sentence is: a young programmer, a quality control analist and a tester all with red faces and slaughtered lamb eyes, while I hold an anomaly notice document on my hands.
The document has a post it stuck on the right, so the line of zeroes can extend beyond the paper's limit.
So... instead of hiring more auditors for this year, they could have put a few megabucks toward some infrastructure improvements. Else that's a government contribution to recovering job losses...
Because, of course, IT manufacturers and professionals don't necessarily need the money, either. (Albeit there wouldn't be as many needed, which might leave some extra government money for someone else to use...)
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
So... the servers are being taxed right now?
My webcomic
Sure, if you want to put it that way, I'll admit that I use about 5-10% of what I pay for when it comes to government. And I'm barely even middle-class.
Let's put this into perspective: we're talking about the most expensive, most powerful government AND world empire (with military bases in some 150 countries) in history. If you don't think the US government has WAY more money than a government needs to provide useful government services, then either you're not thinking hard enough, or you're in the business of government yourself.
Because we have a system built on the idea of coercing people to behave a certain way than a system which encourages productivity, savings, and the like. A system which allows petty government bureaucrats to punish or reward particular constituencies on near whim. Hence we are saddled with such a complex system that billions are spent by the government to administer it and billions more by individuals and companies to comply with it.
and in the end, we still spend nearly 40% more than we take in.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You know, the first thing I look at when designing IT infrastructure is where to simplify the existing process before converting it to a computer-assisted model. The IRS tax laws, exemptions, and everything else is unnecessarily complicated for what they are charged with. Don't fault the IRS for being slow and making mistakes when you've saddled them with such a dense and overly complex process that people can make a career out of gaming it.
Processing several hundred million requests is something some web servers do on a daily basis without much problem.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Unless you owe a lot in taxes or back taxes and just need the extra time to come up with the money...why would you wait until the very last day to file? Come on...you are going to have to do it eventually, why not do it early and get it over with?
We e-filed back in the third week of January...and both of us got our Federal & State returns literally three business days later direct deposited. If you don't owe any money and are due back a tax return, why wouldn't you file as soon as possible?
Living With a Nerd
Interesting about the security complaints...
I'm sure the IRS will _always_ be slammed about security issues - it's a very complex organization and their
systems' complexity is commensurate with that. So, it stands to reason that there will always be one security
issue or another - the question is, how bad are the issues and how quickly can they respond to a detected
problem with a temporary workaround and eventually a more permanent solution. Until the next one(s)...
...surface-to-air missiles. There's still a lot of douchebags out there.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Scanning today's news turns up a lot of good examples for how the code could be simplified.
The five dumbest parts of the U.S. tax code
1) Ethanol credits increase the price of food, and give paper manufacturers more money in credits than they make from selling paper.
2) Exemption for inherited stock-gains.
3) Mortgage-interest deduction encourages people to buy as much house as they can afford, and encourages owning over renting to the detriment of other investments.
4) Exemption on employer-provided health insurance encourages employers to give more health insurance instead of wage increases, and discourages health insurers from competing on price.
5) Municipal-bond-interest exclusion gives more benefit to rich bond owners than it does to the municipalities that issue the bonds.
Congressman Wyden leads effort to simplify tax code
Taxes: There is a Better Way by U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg
The IRS's web presence (rather than their back-end data processing) is very good because they are heavily Akamaized: everything is hosted through Akamai's infrastructure, so its very quick to get to the IRS website.
Additionally, their site design is actually remarkably good and easy to navigate, so its both technically quick and usably quick.
But this is really orthoginal to the main issue in the article, which is the back-end, in-house infrastructure for processing all the returns.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Filing your taxes early increases the odds of an audit.
It's time to admit that government makes everyone worse off than we would otherwise be. And before anyone says "but wait, they built the roads!", yes, I believe roads could be provided voluntarily without taxation. along with every other important function they do.
Tu quoque is not a valid argument form.
Your argument is a false dilemma; either the government will provide these things, or they will not be provided. It ignores the alternative of other institutions providing them.
Maybe it's so fast because it only has 50-75% uptime. The IRS website is the only website I've ever seen that was "closed." See here.
Liberty in your lifetime
They have a flat tax for every income category - income, gains, munis, etc. So you give your fed-taxable-income, add back the state tax deduction, multiply the tax rate, subtract prepaid tax to obtain refund/owed. I could say/do this on an elevator ride.
I find the one tax rate unfair for investment income and poor people. But its damn simple.
So I guess the "This Road Is Being Paid by Federal Funds" sign I drove by on the way to work today was all part of a vast conspiracy.
For years, there's been a pie chart near the end of every for 1040 instruction booklet showing how incoming and outgoing funds are allocated. Interest on the national debt is 8%.
This year it's on page 100: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040.pdf
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Back when you could get a savings account with 5% APY I would agree with this wholeheartedly. Now that most institutions offer less than 1% APY it really makes me question if the effort is worth it for what amounts to one movie ticket.
Effort?
You log into your bank site, set up a recurring transfer, and log out. That takes what, three minutes?
Even if you get no interest back at all, you get to see exactly how much you've saved at any time, and can withdraw on your own schedule, not the government's. Even the most inconvenient and obtuse bank is easier to deal with than the IRS.
oh great.
The IRS website was working just fine until now. Then somebody had to post a direct link to a 175 page pdf on slashdot.
Or, tell Intuit to fix it, as that's who actually made it. I submitted a tax return form on Monday, only to have it rejected with Error Code 0010, saying to correct the Following Form:
The biggest pain was that there was nothing after "the Following Form:", so I had no clue where to look. Turns out that I had to fill every line that was N/A for me (which I left blank) with zeros.
In addition, when tabbing through from one entry field to the next, the order jumps all the hell around the 1040 form and more than half of the tabbed fields are used as spacing!
E.g:
34 Tuition and fees deduction. Attach Form 8917.........
where the [.........] is its own entry field, yet a place where one is clearly NOT to input anything.
And regarding someone else's comment about "Just use Quicken:" it's the government's responsibility to collect taxes in a cost-effective manner. Expecting that a measurable percent of its population to purchase tax software every year is not being cost-effective. The government should be able to provide its own software at a similar level of quality for a lower overall cost to the citizens. (think: bargaining power & efficiencies of scale)
Effort?
You log into your bank site, set up a recurring transfer, and log out. That takes, what, three minutes?
Even if you get no interest back at all, you get to see exactly how much you've saved at any time, and can withdraw on your own schedule, not the government's. Even the most inconvenient and obtuse bank is easier to deal with than the IRS.
n/t
Several billion dollars a year are funded out of federal general fund appropriations, which is significantly made up of federal income taxes. That is about 1% of total highway spending. ("Funding For Highways and Disposition of Highway-User Revenues, All Units of Government, 2007" http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2007/hf10.cfm)
In addition, in 2009-2010, $26 billion in federal general budget funds were obligated for National Highway projects as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, aka $700+ billion "Stimulus") http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ The ARRA is funded out of general appropriations, made significantly up of income tax receipts.
The federal funding for highway construction that was provided prior to 1955 (unknown percentage compared to state funding), was provided by the general fund of the U.S. Treasury (significantly made up of income taxes). In addition, "In September 2008 the Highway Trust Fund (funded by federal fuel taxes) was depleted of funds and required a transfer of $8 billion from federal general revenue funds, by act of Congress. Currently the fund is projected to run out in 2009." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Highway_Trust_Fund_%28United_States%29)
1950's - "The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954 set aside $175 million for the construction of an interstate highway system. However, even more money was needed for the system that Eisenhower envisioned, and he continued to press for funds. Two years later, the expanded Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized a budget of $25 billion, of which the federal share was to be 90%." (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/interstate1.html) The federal fuel tax was established in 1956 as well, to fund the Highway Trust Fund.
Currently - "About 70% of the construction and maintenance costs of highways in the U.S. are covered through user fees (net of collection costs), primarily gasoline taxes collected by the federal government and state and local governments, and to a much lesser extent tolls collected on toll roads and bridges. The rest of the costs are borne by general fund receipts, bond issues, and designated property and other taxes. The federal contribution is overwhelmingly from motor vehicle and fuel taxes (93.5% in 2007), as is about 60% of the state contribution. However, local contributions are overwhelmingly from sources other than user fees. The portion of the user fees spent on highways themselves covers about 57% of costs, as approximately one-sixth of the user fees are diverted to other programs, prominently including mass transit. In the eastern United States, large sections of some Interstate Highways planned or built prior to 1956 are operated as toll roads." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Financing)
Ugh. That's sickening. Somewhere between 57% and 81% of the country's income, down the drain. (And probably closer to the 81%—the range comes from how much of the "national defense" figure is actually for national defense, and not national offense or the other cited worthless social programs.)
I find that I must take exception to your comment made at 12:18 PM on April 15th, 2010:
You realize that's about the worst possible way to manage your money, right?
Although this does sound like a poor money management strategy, I can hardly believe it is the worst one. /. to find the truly most sub-optimal money management policy. I'll throw out a couple of examples for starters, but I make no claim of them being the worst money-management strategy.
Certainly there must be worse ways to manage your money than that? Perhaps we should crowdsource to
It's a giant fucking hassle not only to pay for government, but to be held responsible for figuring out exactly how much they want.
It's nothing but an insult. They're the ones taking my money, not the other way around. But that's not good enough -- they want me to do their work as well.
But, does it run Linux?
The South African revenue service has been running Linux for several years, but the USA is always behind the curve...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
After 5 years and $400 million in development, they haven't come up with a client software for the taxpayer to use to file his taxes, which may make it easier for them as well as the client. Another possibility would be to release the specifications for data transmission, and accept said transmissions so the open source world could make some client tax software. This would be excellent for the taxpayer as folks learn the intricacies of the tax code it could be integrated into the software, instead of relying on a questionable corporation to do it. It seems the reason there is only a couple of tax software vendors would be from corruption and graft. The freedom of information act should get the specifications, but acceptance of the data would need some lobbying.
The tax return for the majority of Americans is a single side of one page; it's called the 1040EZ. But when you say that tax rates are to be capped, are you even aware that for the majority of wage earners, payroll taxes, not income taxes, are the majority of the federal taxes they pay, and that if you're making less than somewhere around $100k a year, they're 7.65% of your wages? (The EITC makes this considerably smaller, but that's part of the income tax code, so presumably you'd be eliminating that.) If you're self-employed, you pay your employer's portion of payroll taxes, so that's 15.30%. How do you make that square with a maximum tax rate of ten percent?
Your wacky idea about a minimum tax percentage derives, I think, from the "Lucky Ducky" meme, which states that poor people get away without paying taxes, and are therefore getting away with something. (Proponents seem reluctant to embrace the joys of poverty, but I'm sure they'll get around to it.) This is, as described above, entirely false; it can only be made true by defining payroll taxes as not being "real" taxes.
Regardless of the merit of your ideas, they don't have much to do with reforming the tax code; they're more about drowning the federal government in a bathtub. As they say, a social safety net, an imperial military, low taxes: pick any two. Historically speaking, we already have all three (top marginal income tax rates were far, far higher in the 1950s); the first and last are severely fraying around the edges as a result.
The tax code is the way that it is for a reason; flat taxation leads to stratification of wealth and societal breakdown. (Interestingly enough, the current tax system is pretty much flat if you count all kinds of tax.) Your ideas read like a mashup of Ron Paul talking points and a fifth-grade understanding of how taxation in the United States works.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The time or payment required to figure taxes drains at least a percent of GDP. Not to mention all the energy to minimize them instead of increasing economic production.
People always talk about the tax code being too complex. This is non-sense. Complex implies intelligence. There is no intelligence in the tax code. It is CONVOLUTED.
because that's what the usa would resemble without the services and regulations you disparage
"Just exactly how much waste, corruption, and antisocial behavior is acceptable?"
i don't know. maybe you should ask a haitian. they have far less of the government bureaucracy and regulations, and their lives are far more poor, and yet filled with much more waste and corruption and antisocial behavior. maybe if haiti had a government more like ours, they wouldn't need your charity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
should have been "this road, responsibility of state and local government, was unconstitutionally paid for by federal funds with insufficient tax income to justify the further indebtedness to the international banking cartels"
Unconstitutionally? You do realize that the Constitution declares the Post Roads to be a Federal responsibility, don't you? Any road that is regularly used by the USPS is ultimately a Federal responsibility.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you think income tax is over-complicated and wasteful, consider this. If we had a simple 1% transaction tax (1/2% paid by buyer, 1/2% paid by seller) on every transction, including income, spending, securities trading, payments to credit card companies, then even if we simply ignore all cash transactions, we could easily pay for all our roads, utilities, services, and wars.
But that won't work, because the idle rich make their money from securities transactions, and they would have to learn how to make more than 1/2% profit on each transaction, which would be too much work.
So instead, the people who are struggling to survive pay a third to a half of their income, and worry if they can live out their life indoors (as opposed to living under a bridge).
Yeah, well if we put YOU in charge, spending on signage alone would triple.
There HAS been a case of almost complete privitization of services, even law enforcement. I suggest you look into Medival Iceland, it is an extremely interesting case.
Yes, I realize that a medival society is difficult to compare to an industrial or post industrial society, but it still proves that the government is not always required to provide.
That is a good point, its just I've run into that passage copypasted over and over and see people support it over and over so I got a little hasty :). Obviously the government provides things, and it even provides some of them extremely well. Some of the things that it provides likely would not be provided for by the free market in the present (such as manned moon missions). But that is only considering the "seen", not the "unseen". Every dollar the government spends is in the end taxed from citizens (either directly or via inflation).
So we "see" the moon landing, the roads, health care, etc, but there is no way to even consider the "unseen" that we have lost. Furthermore, even assuming a government running at maximum efficiency, we still must consider the deadweight loss from taxation.
You be careful about absolutes. How much of that is corporate income tax on profits ( a valid, constitutional tax ) vs. individual "income" tax (theft)?
Nope, the Supreme Court's interpretation in early 19th century was quite narrow, to designate which (existing) roads were postal roads.
no, If I were in charge there would be no sign. and no fed money for state roads, education, healthcare.
No massive military to project power over the globe, so no korean or vietnam or iraq or gulf war.
No billions of dollars in overt and covert foreign aid.
No federal reserve system.
Thus no need for income tax, with a federal government 1/20th the size or less than it is now.
If there was a way to stagger the due dates, such as by state or last name letter, then they wouldn't have such a huge peak to build infrastructure and staffing around. They could split the load over the year. The cost of handling such a huge peak is passed onto us taxpayers in the end[1].
For example, CA and TX may be due in January, NY and SC in February, etc.
[1] double entendre
Table-ized A.I.
I do mine the medium-fashioned way, with a text file open in vi, a copy of bc running in another tab, and evince filling out the IRS's fillable PDFs. But I can imagine that some people really hate doing calculation or are terrible at it (a lot of people hate and fear mathematics), and the price is worth it to them in that it would cost them eighty or ninty dollars' worth of time and aggravation to do it by hand.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I am aware of US history since the Great Depression, but I don't think you are.
Here's a chart of income inequality since World War I. Note that it begins to rise in the 1970s. Here's a chart of top marginal tax rates since the income tax was introduced. Note that the top tax on earned income drops precipitously in the 1970s.
So, yes, the current tax code is creating stratification of wealth (and therefore, societal breakdown), because it's insufficiently progressive. Your proposals make it even worse.
The U.S. government needs to learn to live on a lot less money, just like everyone else does when the economy goes sour, get it?
No. No, this is absolutely wrong. Basic macroeconomics states that the government can, when things go bad, take on debt and add money to the economy when it "goes sour", as you put it. The idea is that boom/bust cycle is smoothed out by the government filling its coffers during booms and emptying them during busts, spending against the cycle. (This is why blowing the early-2000s surplus on tax cuts for very, very rich people was a particularly bad idea.)
This is out of the Norquistian playbook--funnel cash to the very wealthy to empty out the treasury, then talk about how excessive government spending is and claim that the only solution is to cut services. An extra zero on a balance sheet is, clearly, more important than starving old people.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The tax code should not be "progressive" at all,
You stated that the current tax code is bad, in that it leads to "stratification of wealth and social breakdown". The current tax system, when you count all the taxes people pay, is, on balance, relatively flat. Therefore, you're arguing against flat taxation.
Your idea to tax every individual at the same rate regardless of their income is the definition of a flat tax. (Actually, since one needs disposable income to contribute it to charity, your plan is somewhat regressive.)
You're arguing both for and against flat taxation. I can only conclude that you're rather confused.
stop with the Marxist based taxation rhetoric already!
The word "Marxist" has a specific meaning. Given that the intellectual history of progressive taxation can be traced back to Adam Smith, you're apparently using it to mean "things I don't like".
Unless you're willing to put forth the claim that the vast majority of economists are closet Marxists and that every democratic nation in the world is run by secret Marxist cabals, a progressive income tax is not a Marxist idea.
The U.S. government needs to be restricted, by Constitutional amendment, to stop spending more than it is making *and* to not spend more than 10 percent or so of the GDP. Those two things are necessary and vital to the survivability of this country.
Staving off a second Great Depression was also necessary and vital to the survivability of this country. Massive tax cuts for the already-wealthy and optional military adventures abroad, on the other hand, were not. If you have a history of arguing against unaffordable tax cuts and spending increases on weapons, please do share it with me. I have a hard time believing that this isn't just the annual crop of people whining about how they don't like to pay taxes.
They are either incompetent or the financial ruin is something they are directly causing and planning to capitalize on. Which is it, smart guy?
Honestly? I think the folks who got us into this mess in the first place circa 2000 (not that the current folks seem terribly inclined to roll back the wars and tax cuts) did so out of a combination of naked self-interest and believing their own nonsense about the Laffer Curve or whatever bit of gimcrackery justified their neofeudalistic ambitions.
Of course, the game is rigged so that, without massive spending cuts (I don't think you've thought through your proposal to have millions of impoverished old people descend on their adult children for a place to live) or--perish the thought!--tax increases, for instance, to the insanely confiscatory levels we suffered through in the horrible dark days of the 1950s, we're stuck here.
I mentioned Grover Norquist before, but since you seem to have gaps in your understanding, I'll summarize his ideology, which has been shared by many of the movers and shakers on the right over the last few decades: You want to cut services, but people seem to enjoy them. So, you cut taxes and spend money, preferably on things that don't really benefit anyone (such as totally optional wars with no defined endpoint), in order to run up a gigantic deficit. Eventually, the government must spend every bit of money it can to service the resultant debt, and will, in the end, have no choice but to cut services.
So, to the extent that any one ideological group is responsible for this little pickle, I blame those guys.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We are not "stuck here", not by any means.
The Federal government needs to be dialed back in scope, influence, money spent, money taken (in the form of taxes, fees, etc.), the whole nine yards.
You might as well stop responding to me, although I see a point or two where I can agree with you, the rest I completely reject.
We are not "stuck here", not by any means.
I didn't say we were stuck here; I said that we're stuck here unless we want politically-infeasible tax increases or massive spending cuts. You're advocating the latter, which would, on the scale you propose, have hideous consequences for the nation, one of which I detailed above.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and claiming that--since you're not proposing anything, I can only conclude that this is your reasoning--magic Free Market Pixies will rapture the worthy off to Galt's Gulch if only we cut taxes and spending enough... that's not an argument. That's rote repetition.
The Federal government needs to be dialed back in scope, influence, money spent, money taken (in the form of taxes, fees, etc.), the whole nine yards.
That's a fascinating assertion. You made some claims up front along the same lines, then showed that you're tragically ignorant of the meaning of Marxism, the history or aims of progressive taxation, the proximate and ultimate reasons for the country's current state of financial affairs and the blindingly obvious consequences of the massive service cuts which have been the objective all along... and now you're just repeating yourself.
You might as well stop responding to me, although I see a point or two where I can agree with you, the rest I completely reject.
You're free to reject whatever you want; you're free to live in whatever kind of weird fantasy world hits your happy spot.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca