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Pennsylvania Sues IBM Over Jobless Claims System Upgrade (cnet.com)
Pennsylvania has sued IBM for $170 million, claiming the company failed to deliver a promised upgrade to its outdated system of processing unemployment claims. From a report: IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment but a company representative told the Associated Press the suit had no merit and the company would fight it. The suit stems from a 2006 fixed-price contract awarded to IBM for $109.9 million with a completion date of February 2010, the state said in a press release. As delays and costs mounted, the state let the contract lapse in 2013 when an independent assessment determined the project had a high risk of failure.
My wife lost her job in 2009 and filed for unemployment in PA... online.. in 5 minutes... and she had a debit card in the mail the following day with money already on it.
What the fuck, exactly, is so outdated about that?
They're all just as bad; IBM, Oracle, Accenture, Deloitte, HP. It's almost irrelevant which one you pick, so punishing one simply forwards the next contract on to the other, who will do just the same thing.
Up here in British Columbia, the Provincial government for decades had a pretty effective in-house IT team, but in seeking savings the government has steadily in-house expertise in favor of private contractors. While not all the contractors I've seen are inept, when it comes to rolling out the big systems, you end up with one of the Big IT firms, and the expected inevitably occurs.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seconded. They royally fucked up PA's tax systems to the tune of $250 MILLION DOLLARS.
Nobody had a clue. I worked on a standalone system that exchanged data at a few points with the main ledger. The old system being a COBOL mainframe, this was done through fixed-field flat files overnight.
Of course, the H1Bs absolutely could not adhere to the old format because, well, H1Bs. The official excuse was that they were designing a common interface for all tax types (we had some weird specific fields at the end) and it would be realtime. So we had a meeting to get the new specs from them. That turned into several weeks of us asking the clown and the clown saying he's get back to us next meeting. I hate to say, I just stopped going, management was already sold and no information was exchanged so what was the point?
Lo and behold, months and months later, when we finally got a spec, it was...surprise, a flat file with everything needlessly rearranged and numerous weird specific fields kludged onto the end. Oh, and batches overnight because the promise of realtime was a lie. No improvement at all, just stupid busywork for everybody.
Of course this was pretty much SOP for them.
At one point, they discovered that the system couldn't handle 0 tax returns. Payments, fine, refunds, fine, but 0? System either crashed (and I mean really crashed, as in servers had to be rebooted) or THREW AWAY the filing record. We couldn't tell if anybody had filed if it was an even return. Who the hell builds a ledger on a framework that can't handle 0? H1Bs, that's who!
And that was _after_ they had implemented the corporate tax part, spent a year mailing bills to dead people and then another year not mailing bills to anybody. For two years the appeals bureau had to cope with all of the deadline/backdating screw-ups this caused. It wasn't isolated either, the system "lost" data like crazy because, well, H1Bs. Everything they touched was a disaster.
Now, when the tax system finally got out to end users inside Revenue, it was a complete basket case from a UI standpoint too. The legacy program came through an IBM terminal program with weird codes to trigger functions because it was a console and there was no easy GUI.
So you'd think with a brand new GUI they'd do menus, right? Wrong! Everything still launched from codes....except DIFFERENT RANDOM codes. Because H1Bs. Once you got into a screen, there were some controls, but has anybody ever had the misfortunate of using an SAP GUI? That's right, clicking a drop down list of 10 items takes 3 minutes to populate. Every single time you click it. Because H1Bs.
And before most of the corporate bugs were fixed, the locusts moved on to income and sales. They managed to fuck up sales so badly that the old system stopped mailing sales tax license renewals. Oh, it was trying to print them, but whatever printing functionality they'd stolen from expert sexchange, err, written themselves, just silently dropped all print requests for months.
It's was just one fuckup after another with them. Accenture, from top to bottom, belongs in prison.
> because, well, H1Bs
To be fair, that's the problem on nearly all projects with contractors. After 34 years of working on software and most of that managing contractors, I've seen that over and over a again. If something is done wrong, they are either going to be gone or get paid per hour to fix the problem. There's no incentive to do the job right or fast.