January 1999

Copied and Pasted from:

Major Management Challenges and Program Risks: Department of Treasury OCG-99-14

The Need to Confront the Challenges Presented by the Year 2000 Computer Problem

IRS, like other Treasury offices and bureaus, is highly dependent on information technology to carry out its mission. Most of Treasurys information systems were not designed to read dates beyond December 31, 1999. As a result, IRS and the other Treasury offices and bureaus are in the midst of a massive effort to make their information systems Year 2000 compliant to avoid significant disruptions to their operations. IRS accounts for the bulk of Treasurys Year 2000 undertaking. Of the estimated $1.9 billion earmarked for Treasurys Year 2000 program, $1.4 billion has been designated for IRS. These cost estimates include work needed for IRS mission-critical information systems, telecommunications networks, and buildings. IRS program also represents one of the largest civilian Year 2000 efforts. At the outset, IRS faced significant challenges in making its systems Year 2000 compliant. In addition to the size of its effort, IRS lacked a comprehensive inventory of information system assets, particularly of its information systems infrastructure (i.e., systems software, hardware, and telecommunications networks), and IRS CIO did not control all mission-critical assets. In a June 1998 report, we said that IRS had made more progress in fixing its applications than its infrastructure. Also, we said that two major Year 2000 system replacement efforts were experiencing schedule slippages. In addition, we identified two risk areas for IRS Year 2000 effortthat is, the absence of an integrated master schedule showing the interdependencies among the many Year 2000 efforts and a limited approach to contingency planning. IRS has begun taking action to address our concerns about a master schedule. We made no recommendations on that risk area in our June 1998 report. Concerning the second risk area, we recommended that the Commissioner take steps to broaden the contingency planning effort to help ensure that IRS had adequately assessed the vulnerabilities of its core business processes to potential Year 2000 system failures. Specifically, we recommended that the Commissioner (1) solicit input from the business functional areas to identify core business processes and identify those processes that must continue in the event of a Year 2000 failure, (2) map IRS mission-critical systems to those core business processes, (3) determine the impact of information system failures on each core business process, (4) assess existing contingency plans for their applicability to potential Year 2000 failures, and (5) develop and test contingency plans for core business processes if existing plans are not appropriate. Since we issued our report, IRS has been taking actions to address our recommendations. IRS had originally planned to have its first set of contingency plans by December 15, 1998; however, according to its officials, IRS did not meet that milestone. We plan to continue monitoring IRS progress in developing contingency plans. If IRS is unable to make its mission-critical systems Year 2000 compliant, IRS could be rendered unable to properly and timely process tax returns, issue refunds, correctly calculate interest and penalties, effectively collect taxes, or prepare accurate financial statements and other financial reports.

-- James Chancellor, PE. (publicworks1@bluebonnet.net), February 10, 1999

Answers

why volunteer?
http://goodbiz.com/tbks/

-- b (b@irssucks.com), February 10, 1999.

The IRS Commissionor claimed in Nov 1998 that they would be fully compliant by Jan 31, 1999.

So they must be completely finished by now (Feb 10, 1999.) Or he's a liar.

What, me worry?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 10, 1999.

Robert,

Here's the link for the article about the IRS being compliant by January 1999...

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,27886,00.html?st.ne.ni.lh

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), February 10, 1999.

"It's official. The IRS has begun receiving their order of over 150,000 copies of Millennium Bug Toolkit."

This announcement is found at the Millennium Bug Toolkit site at:

http://www.fix4y2k.com/welcome.html

-- Bonnie Camp (bonniec@mail.odyssey.net), February 10, 1999.

Sorry, the link is at

www.gao.gov

go to the "high risk" documents

-- James Chancellor (publicworks1@bluebonnet.net), February 10, 1999.

Robert,

>The IRS Commissionor claimed in Nov 1998 that they would be fully compliant by Jan 31, 1999.

May we have a reference for that November claim?

In the October 23, 1998 Reuters article Rossotti is quoted as claiming, "all key [IRS] systems will be Y2K compliant by January 1999". (Note weasel-word "key" but also "by January", i.e., January 1.)

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), February 11, 1999.

That is in the html above. (It was Oct, not Nov, though.)

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 11, 1999.