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  • April 17.

  • In 2018, this was Tax Day.

  • It’s the deadline for American taxpayers to submit their income tax returns to the

  • federal government.

  • Yet on Tax Day 2018, the IRS electronic filing system was down.

  • Millions were attempting to e-File on that day alone and nearly every one of them were denied.

  • Turns out the IRS's computers were still partially relying on old assembly code meant for mid-20th

  • century IBM mainframes, and a buggy update

  • had caused their modern systems to come crashing down.

  • What happened?

  • This is LGR Tech Tales, where we take a look at noteworthy stories of technological inspiration,

  • failure, and everything in-between.

  • This episode tells the tale of the 2018 Tax Day outage and the cold war-era technology

  • that contributed to it.

  • In 1959, the Internal Revenue Service had some big problems.

  • 260 million of them, actually.

  • That was the number of tax documents they had to check from 1958, with over 60 million

  • individuals and 975,000 corporations all submitting their tax returns that year.

  • Even though the IRS employed 50,000 people, checking 60 million documents by hand was

  • unfeasible, much less the millions of tax audits on top of that.

  • And that’s where International Business Machines came in, with the latest and greatest

  • of their so-calledbrain machines,” “electronic brains,” or simplycomputers.”

  • And in 1959, the new hotness were these gigantic,

  • room-filling mainframes from the IBM 700 and 7000 series.

  • Specifically, the IRS made use of the IBM 7074 starting in the early 1960s, capable

  • of calculating word lengths of up to ten digits in addition to a sign, with a total memory

  • capacity ranging from 10 to 20 kilobytes in its standard configuration.

  • Now, the entire tax return and history of each American citizen could fit onto a single

  • four-inch long, half-inch wide strip of magnetic tape, accessible on equipment costing the

  • IRS just $4,000 in daily rental fees. Or $33,150 per day adjusted for inflation.

  • By 1966, the IRS had gone onto invest in enough IBM hardware that the entire country’s taxes

  • could be checked by computer every year.

  • And their latest machine was an absolute monster: The Martinsburg Monster, as it was known,

  • both for its size and its location in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

  • And also for its reputation as Uncle Sam’s cold, calculating tax monster, expected to

  • catch billions of dollars in unreported income.

  • In reality, the monster was an IBM System/360, one of a family of mainframes that IBM delivered

  • to governments, businesses, universities, and anyone who had a few hundred thousand

  • dollars from 1965 to 1978.

  • And for the time this was absolutely state of the art, thanks to an impressive tape storage

  • solution: the Individual Master File.

  • The IMF was stored on a couple thousand reels of tape and held the data for each individual

  • taxpayer, corporation, legal entity, and whatever else the IRS needed.

  • When an employee needed to look something up, the appropriate tape could be loaded using

  • the Martinsburg Monster and checked against a selection of punch cards to verify everything

  • from an individual’s name, address, money owed,

  • marital status, tax credits, deductions, and so on.

  • And for a while this was rather disconcerting to the general public, with stories in the

  • news describing it with such phrases asun-American,”

  • Orwellian,” “an ultimate weapon,” andfrightening.”

  • - [CBS reporter] There are those at Internal Revenue who say that if this building in Martinsburg,

  • West Virginia were filled with hay instead of computers it still would put the fear of

  • god in us all so long as it said National Computer Center on the outside.

  • This is where we are at, the end of the line for all of us, lined up together on the shelves

  • of internal revenues National Computer Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

  • The Martinsburg Monster.

  • The very idea of computer checking returns conjures up images of frightening efficiency,

  • which guarantee either that you can't cheat or that the other fellow can't cheat, depending

  • on how you look at it.

  • - [LGR] Of course, the US government did what the US government does and released a series

  • of short propaganda films to try and explain exactly what the Monster was doing, and how

  • the computer wasn’t evil at all, but merely super good at its job.

  • - [IRS narrator] This is the real heart of the Martinsburg Monster.

  • Nearly everyone in the United States has some concern

  • with this mechanical marvel and its electronic relatives.

  • Electronic computers have made it possible for IRS to process millions more returns than

  • would have been possible by hand.

  • Returns go through a carefully planned cycle of processing operations.

  • When information from each return is later transferred to the punch cards, the machines

  • of course check the math.

  • - [LGR] Whether or not the public embraced this new faceless overlord though,

  • it didn’t really matter.

  • What the federal government really cared about was its proficiency doling out refunds and

  • catching more tax cheaters than humans could.

  • And considering that by 1968 the IRS was bringing in an additional 25 billion dollars in taxes

  • year over year, the government’s continued investment in tax computing was justified.

  • By the mid 1970s, there were mainframes, terminals, and now minicomputer systems in all of the

  • most important regional IRS centers across the country.

  • Allowing them to collect an additional 5 billion dollars annually by 1977 due to the larger

  • number of successful audits, with computerized detection having become so accurate that the

  • odds of an audited taxpayer losing a case were 4 to 1.

  • Meaning that you’d have a better chance succeeding at a game of Russian Roulette than

  • against the Martinsburg Monster.

  • By the 1980s, the microcomputer revolution was in full swing, with machines that packed

  • unprecedented performance in a form factor that fit onto a desktop.

  • Not only that, but modem usage was increasing alongside them, allowing microcomputer users

  • to dial into far-off computer systems remotely.

  • Tech-savvy tax practitioners in particular got an early jump onto the personal computer

  • bandwagon in order to help them prepare taxes, even if the IRS still required them to print

  • out and physically mail in each return.

  • It wasn’t until the mid-80s that the IRS Research Division started experimenting with

  • a new Electronic Filing System.

  • The first e-filing in the US happened in 1986, performed by just five tax preparers in three

  • metropolitan areas: Cincinnati, Phoenix, and Raleigh-Durham.

  • The process went like this: a tax preparer would use their personal computer’s modem

  • to dial into the main IRS Cincinnati Service Center, and an IRS employee would pick up

  • the call, plug the phone line into a Mitron magnetic tape terminal, and the completed

  • digital tax return was received.

  • It was then processed by the IRS on a minicomputer system using a newly-created e-File program

  • written using COBOL.

  • This final step was one of the trickier parts of the process, requiring the assistance of

  • retired programmers to develop software which could interface with the aging IRS computer

  • systems from the 60s and 70s, which also ran COBOL.

  • After 25,000 digital tax returns were processed successfully in 1986, the e-File system was

  • deemed a success and work began on expanding its usage.

  • Nationwide e-filing commenced in 1990, and although the system still only allowed returns

  • that were due a refund, 4.2 million of them were electronically filed that year.

  • In 1999 electronic payments through credit and debit cards were introduced, along with

  • the ability to sign returns electronically instead of by mail.

  • The e-File system continued to expand alongside the explosive growth of the internet in the

  • 2000s, with Free File and Modernized e-File debuting in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

  • This resulted in a record 68.4 million returns filed electronically in 2005, and in 2011,

  • e-filed returns crossed 100 million that tax season, meaning that approximately three out

  • of every four US tax returns were now filed electronically.

  • With all this in mind then: what happened in 2018 that caused the whole system to fail?

  • Are they still using all those old mainframes and minicomputers running COBOL or what?

  • Well, in a word, yes. Kind of.

  • While the old IBM machines themselves are long gone, the actual programs they ran remained

  • in use throughout the emergence of the modern e-filing system.

  • And as of the making of this video, the IRS still relies on those old programs written

  • in COBOL and IBM assembly languages.

  • Remember the Individual Master File, the giant database of all individual taxpayers?

  • Well, the IMF is still relied upon to reference all that taxpayer data, meaning that even

  • though the computer hardware itself has been upgraded, they still have to emulate the computer

  • systems from the Kennedy Administration.

  • Not only that, but every time the US tax code changes, the old programs have to be updated,

  • and this has caused a massive headache for the IRS.

  • According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2016, some 20 million lines of code

  • are still used that date back to the creation of the IMF in the 1960s.

  • And this ancient programming is only going to result in greater challenges as time marches

  • on, something the government has been aware of for decades.

  • But despite ongoing efforts at modernization and hundreds of millions spent since the late

  • 90s, the Individual Master File remains begrudgingly in use.

  • And there were copious problems with its planned replacement, the Customer Account Data Engine.

  • Despite lofty ambitions and nearly half a billion in funding, CADE was only ever used

  • as a hybrid system tied to the old master file, delivering on only 15 percent of its

  • promised capabilities before being canceled in 2009.

  • And this brings us to the outage of April 17, 2018.

  • According to a Treasury Inspector General report later that year, a known firmware bug

  • caused a Tier 1 high-availability storage array to fail at around 3 AM on Tax Day.

  • This was an 18-month-old piece of hardware installed to support the Individual Master File.

  • That morning it detected a deadlock condition after a warmstart due to cache overflow, causing

  • 59 systems in total to fail.

  • Since almost all other IRS services and systems ingest data from the IMF mainframe, they too

  • failed, and e-File systems were offline for 11 hours during Tax Day.

  • It was later determined that buggy firmware on their IBM hardware was to blame, something

  • that IBM had known about since June of 2017.

  • And IBM released a firmware update fixing the bug that November, five months before Tax Day.

  • But after a December 2017 meeting between them and Unisys, the agency’s storage contractor,

  • the IRS decided not to update on the advice of Unisys, since the older firmware was thought

  • to be more stable in supporting the all-important Individual Master File.

  • And so, millions of people were freaking out

  • all over the United States, unable to pay their taxes.

  • And droves of IT specialists were freaking out in government computer centers, scrambling

  • to get everything back online while the higher-ups breathed down their necks.

  • All over a bad piece of firmware on a storage device holding a bunch of primordial software

  • programmed before the moon landing.

  • While there are currently plans to replace the Individual Master File with a new system,

  • CADE 2, that still hasn’t happened either.

  • Will the system continue to hold together until the IMF is finally replaced?

  • That remains to be seen, but until then, I hope youve enjoyed this episode of LGR Tech Tales!

  • Never thought I’d do a video about taxes, but whatever, I just like computers, stories

  • about computers, and using computers to make videos about computers.

  • If ya like this kinda thing then stick around, I’ve got new videos every week right here on LGR.

  • And as always, thank you very much for watching!

April 17.

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どのように60歳の国税庁のコンピュータシステムは、税金の日に失敗しました。 (How the 60-Year-Old IRS Computer System Failed on Tax Day)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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