Return to Article: Government Executive Vol. 36, No.9
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5020
This is about the 1000th article I've read on this subject and a couple of points need to be made. 1) The computers in use at the IRS are state-of-the-art. The applications are operated in a manner consistent with the 1960s. 2) Assembler language is not archaic, it is not a commonly used language. Schools haven' taught assembler for 30 years. They taught COBOL, then C, the Java etc. The IRS taught all its personnel in house, and for 30 years IT has delivered one successful filing season after another. 3) If Mr. Grams is the financial whizz he's made out to be the question is why would an enterprise re-write 10's of millions of lines of code. The applications merely need to be changed to operate in a more modern manner, mainly they need to update the Masterfile daily instead of weekly. This change would cost the taxpayers a fraction of what has already been spent on "modernization". The myth that the Masterfile will break is laughable.
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