Missing E-Mail Is the Least of the IRS's Problems

Last year, after requesting an ITIN for my wife (who is not a US citizen and thus requires an SSN-esque replacement to be able to file joint taxes), we received two letters from the IRS. One had the ITIN. The other denied our request for the ITIN on the basis that "We have already issued her an ITIN." Apparently, the IRS explains, that second letter should have immediately set my accountant and I to doing forensic debugging of their protocols, because it means that something "seriously wrong" happened to our returns.

What? Glad you asked. See, the IRS had lost my return. "What?" The paper was "in the building somewhere" -- we had gotten a receipt -- but they were unaware of what desk it was at. (Their first hypothesis was "You failed to file", and they threatened penalties for that, until being confronted with a Post Office return receipt. Which is, by the by, why you should always get a receipt.)

My accountant took over yelling at them for a while to find the return, and they eventually did, and -- miracle of miracles -- they typed it into the computer. Twice. Thus generating two separate and equal returns going through non-idempotent processes, such as ITIN generation.

When those two returns met up in the reconciliation stage, they blocked each other from processing. No one at the IRS noticed this, for approximately 7 months, until my third call to their CS line got someone to actually look at the file. She hit "delete" on the duplicate. (I really hope she was simplifying that for me, because it scares me if they can actually delete anything.) Return processed almost immediately, refund check cut 48 hours later.

I almost feel sorry for them on being unprepared to unearth potential political malfeasance, because that is after all a distraction from the day to day administration of the Revenue Code, but processing returns is, as the saying goes, "their only job."

The principle job was to build a fraud investigation system by integrating a COTS analysis tool into the IRS systems to automatically generate cases for fraud investigation officers to review. One hitch, as I found out after getting through the gauntlet of interviews, the COTS product that they wanted to use wasn't built to support this kind of integration and the vendor wasn't interested in forking off a special build just for the IRS.

So I asked them a simple question "knowing what I know about this product, and the fact that it can't be integrated as desired, it seems that this is an impossible task, as the senior architect, I'd want to be clear that I have powers to restart the selection process of the tools and systems so I can build a solution that would actually perform as required, would I have this authority?"

At this point, the senior manager from the prime and the pm from the government side got very agitated. You see, there was only 2 months to get a basic system functional and as a result the selection and purchase process had already been completed.

"Without anybody leading the process?"

This was apparently the wrong question, as I had hit some sort of embarrassing point I shouldn't have dug into. They pretty much just wanted somebody in the role to rubber stamp the crap decisions they had already made. They became very defensive, there was some raised voices. I told them I wasn't interested in that kind of position and walked out.

2 years later I found out that they had scrapped the program completely after spending goodness knows how much money and were restarting the entire thing from scratch.

My gut feeling is that this new program too will fail since any working system would likely detect the fraud in their IT acquisition and management.

I havent worked at that job since 2007. I find it unbelievable that any major government organization such as the IRS does not make sure ALL emails are never lost.

edit: the fact that they lost emails is a huge scandal in its own right IMO

"The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records."[0]

[0] http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html

> A private company under investigation that responded to regulators, or a judge, with this sort of explanation rather than producing the requested documents would rightly expect to be handed an adverse judgment or a whopping fine.

Why? Since when is the onus to disprove on the defense and the onus to prove not on the plaintiff? If you suspect a conspiracy to cover up one's tracks, you can go after the defendant additionally for that. But you still have to prove it. I'm not a lawyer but if there is any truth to this statement it is a tarnish on our judicial system. A legal system that convicts based on the possibility of IT problems is hardly reliant on surpassing "reasonable doubt."

I think AND is more appropriate than OR here.

What? I'm almost certain the hard drive I had in 2000 was less than 10GB. At 500MB per email user, that's 20 users per entire disk...