The IRS Wages War on the Millennium Bug
At the dawn of the Information Age, utopian theorists predicted that computers would free us from laborious tasks to focus on more challenging problems. But the Internal Revenue Service is now finding the opposite to be true, at least in one instance. To prevent its computers from going haywire when they have to process dates involving the year 2000, the agency is hastily launching a conversion program that will require at least 1,800 staff years of labor by Jan. 1, 1999.
The fundamental problem is one shared by both government and business: most computers have been programmed to assume that the first two digits of every year are 19. And when the IRS computers begin processing tax returns that refer to the year 2000, they will read that date as 1900 and send out what IRS computer chief Arthur Gross admits will be “millions” of erroneous refunds and bills. Since the IRS collects and processes more than $1 trillion annually, such glitches could knock the U.S. economy on its heels, according to a Times report.
The tax agency certainly deserves some of the blame for its predicament. Computer experts in both the public and private sectors have been warning about the “Year 2000” problem since the early 1980s. But only now is the IRS beginning to tackle the problem in earnest. To date, it has surveyed the problem in only one of its four software groups, and only allocated $45 million to fix a problem that experts say could cost billions of dollars.
Government agencies have been unable to benefit from the decade-long efforts of private business to tackle the turn-of-the-millennium software conversion problems. That’s because successful companies won’t reveal their solutions, even to the government, for fear of losing a competitive advantage. There is, however, no excuse for the failure of government agencies to work with one another on the problem.
The Small Business Administration, for instance, has successfully transitioned from mainframe computers incapable of understanding “2000” to minicomputers adept at leaping into the new millennium. But the foot-dragging continues at most other federal agencies.
For instance, the Health Care Finance Administration, an agency overseeing federal programs like Medicare, says it will solve the conversion problem by replacing its mainframes with minicomputers by the year 1999. But a government oversight committee says the agency is already behind schedule on the changeover. A similar effort by the Social Security Administration is now on the verge of completion. It took 10 years.
