What is far more scary than the old stuff our government is running in COBOL, is the new stuff running in Excel. Excel became a de facto Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), accessibly to anybody. Old COBOL programs were still developed with some software engineering discipline. Current Excel spreadsheets have none of that. And, this doesn't apply to the government only - private enterprise runs bazillions(?) untested, unverified spreadsheets. Wish I could share what I've seen.