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To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (45009)	11/15/1999 3:25:00 PM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116753

The IRS and Y2K Mike Adams November 15, 1999 (Part One of Five) The IRS operates one of the world's largest and most complex distributed databases. I've seen a diagram of the data pathways at the IRS, and I can assure you, it looks much, much worse than the New Jersey highway system. The IRS has an impossible task: calculating (or verifying) the tax bill for over a hundred million people by following tax laws so confusing that no two accountants can ever agree on the amount owed. Making matters worse, the tax code is altered every year by politicians, requiring IRS programmers to essentially build a new "tax formula" every single year. But because these new tax rules aren't retroactive, they have to preserve the old tax code formulas as well. This creates, in effect, an annual "version" of the entire tax code. Why is this important? Because it multiplies the IRS's Y2K remediation task by a factor of at least ten. They not only have to fix the code for 1999, but they have to retroactively update code for the 1998 tax year, the 1997 tax year, and so on, all the way back to the 1980s. DON'T FORGET THE DATA You might ask: Why can't they just update the 1999 tax year code base and forget about the earlier years? Because of the Y2K status of the data. The taxpayer records must be updated to a four-digit field in order for the 1999 and 2000 tax code formulas to work. As a result, this update makes the data incompatible with earlier code formulas unless they, too, are Year 2000 remediated. The bottom line in all this is rather disturbing: no organization has a larger Y2K software remediation task than the IRS. Is it any wonder, then, that the IRS seems to be lagging in its effort? HIGH RISK Last week, IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti unleashed a shocker: the IRS had not yet completed its inventory of computers(cont) 216.46.238.34