Disturbing news from NBC/Associated Press:
Feds Spending Tech Money on Floppy Disks and COBOL, Report Says
The government is spending about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems, including platforms more than 50 years old in vital areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. One still uses floppy disks.
In a report to be released Wednesday, nonpartisan congressional investigators say the increasing cost of maintaining museum-ready equipment devours money better spent on modernization.
On the one hand, if it ain't broke. On the other hand, the lack of efficiency and interoperability is seriously hurting us. The article lists a couple of the more egregious examples. Here are two of them:
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- Treasury's individual and business master files, the authoritative data sources for taxpayer information. The systems are about 56 years old, and use an outdated computer language that is difficult to write and maintain. Treasury plans to replace the systems, but has no firm dates.
- Social Security systems that are used to determine eligibility and estimate benefits, about 31 years old. Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Most of the employees who developed these systems are ready to retire and the agency will lose their collective knowledge," the report said. "Training new employees to maintain the older systems takes a lot of time."
Another reason to eliminate the IRS and go with a simple flat tax - eliminate all of the tax loopholes too. Everyone pays their fair share. As more boomers retire, the loads on the Social Security computers will only increase. I seriously doubt if additional hardware could be purchased that would run COBOL. I remember back with the Year 2000 scare, a lot of legacy companies were scrambling to find COBOL programmers to patch their systems against the date rollover. That was 16 years ago - COBOL programmers have only gotten more scarce.
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