The IRS System Processing Your Taxes Is Almost 60 Years Old

What does my country think will happen if it continues to strip education budgets? Don't we know enough from our experience with Mississippi? Haven't the teacher strikes taught us our lesson? Why did America reject the concept of universal education, do we not believe that engineers and doctors generate enough profit for our country? Are we not understanding that other countries will fill the brain gap?

Why is infrastructure being so universally neglected? Why is public transit being reviled? What happens when the oil runs out? Do we just not care? Why does nobody in government seem to give a shit?

Why is funding being stripped more and more from critical organizations like the IRS? Are we just pushing it to see how far we can go? "Well, it hasn't completely annihilated the coffers of the USGOV yet, I guess we can keep pulling money out of it." Is that the justification?

I hate to be so fatalistic but it also seems like the people with power have already given up and are strip-mining what they can before the whole thing falls around everyone's head. I mean, I guess we survived the dotcom bust and the housing crisis... but people smarter than me have been writing that we're heading straight towards not only another housing crisis, but an even worse student loan crisis.

Older people, what's your perspective? Is the castle crashing around our ears or is this just another cycle?

Seems unfair for the government to have to "compete" with private companies to offer services using decades old technology. Or in the case of the IRS, it seems wasteful and inefficient.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329 (The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java)

https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...:

> Now, IRS is on the verge of solving this problem. The solution was engineered by a group of about eight people. And not under a multi-hundred-million-dollar systems integration contract. A leader of the group was Jian Wang, a Chinese emigre who is now a naturalized citizen. Wang told me his solution isn’t a silver bullet but rather a carefully worked-out methodology. It has three components so potentially powerful the IRS has filed patent applications for them.

> I say “was” because he’s left the agency, and the status of the project is dark.

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

> “The last one ran out this past summer,” Koskinen said. The departures included Wang. He says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment authority expired. By then he’d accepted another job. Wang says he had a house to pay for, kids to educate. Koskinen confirms the agency wanted to convert Wang. But the process of approval from Treasury headquarters and the Office of Personnel Management simply took too long.

Note: this is a repost of a comment I made previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16859012. This system has come up in the news a lot recently, but the articles are usually frustratingly vague the effort to replace it, which seems really interesting. There are so many critical mainframe programs running in business and government, and it's not an easy job to replace them. For instance, my employer has been working at it for 20 years.

It can take 3-10 months to find a job, if you lose a software job, imagine if the next day you just auto-start working on government projects maybe at a 20% reduction of your normal salary until you find a real job to replace the one you lost..