About That IRS Computer Crash The Obama tax man blames you because his e-filing system failed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-that-irs-computer-crash-1524092020
Someone at the Internal Revenue Service seems to have kicked a plug out of the wall on Tuesday: The agency’s computer system tanked on, of all days, tax filing deadline day. Thus arrived an irresistible metaphor for government incompetence, albeit with the perennial calls for more funding.
Many taxpayers arrived at the IRS website on Tuesday prepared to sign away significant portions of their income. According to news stories, a message greeted them that the IRS website had a “planned outage” from April 17, 2018 to “December 31, 9999.” Should we check back in the morning or afternoon?
The agency said it “encountered system issues” and extended the filing deadline by a day, which is nice. But collecting revenue is the purpose of this bureaucracy. This debacle is like having an aircraft carrier that can’t move off the docks when a war starts.
On cue came the armada blaming budget cuts. Former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen lectured that he knew a system failure was coming without more money. It seems lost on Mr. Koskinen that this failure is an indictment of his leadership. The IRS budget has decreased by about 9% in nominal terms since 2010. But the IRS has $11 billion to play with in 2018, which is presumably enough to keep the computers working on the most important day of the year.
But the agency hasn’t addressed some of its own manifold problems, and the House has held hearings detailing the dysfunction. One problem, surprise, has been updating information technology.
A Treasury Department Inspector General last fall told Congress: “The IRS’s reliance on legacy (i.e., older) systems, aged hardware, and outdated programming languages pose significant risks to the IRS’s ability to deliver its mission. Modernizing the IRS’s computer systems has been a persistent challenge for several decades and will likely remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.”
A Government Accountability Office report last year found 166 outstanding recommendations about IT security. Good thing these folks don’t have sensitive information . . .
These deficiencies are a matter of priorities, not funding. The cynical reality is that bureaucracies are shrewd and skimp on core services—taxpayer customer service lines—to extort more public dollars.
The House this week is moving bills that would try to “modernize” the agency, with some IT updates that now look prescient. Most of the trouble will fall to the next commissioner, a tax lawyer named Charles Rettig. Give the man a public service award if he can simply keep the website running on tax day.
Comments are closed.
