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by n-exploit 2431 days ago
"On 17 April 2018, the final day for U.S. citizens to file 2017 tax returns, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) suffered a major system failure related to the hardware supporting its 58-year old, 20-million-line Cobol-based Individual Master File system [PDF], which is still being used today to process the vast majority of individual tax returns. As a result of the failure, the IRS extended by a day the filing due date."

Maybe that's because a decades-old system hit capacity, and has nothing to do with the system design?

1 comments

"While it’s true that the IRS has experienced budget reductions over the past several years, those cuts hardly explain a failure of an 18-month-old piece of computer hardware. More important, those claims conveniently ignore that the IRS has spent untold billions since the late 1960s on numerous attempts to modernize its IT systems, all centered on trying to replace the ancient IMF system, with minimum success."

I assume you didn't read the whole source