Yesterday, I had to call the IRS to obtain an address to mail a return to (it had to go to a special address), and discuss collection activities for another client. Unfortunately, the IRS computer system crashed. (It came back up late in the day.) This morning, I went to run some transcripts and, again, the system was down.
The main IRS computer system dates to 1959. That is not a typographical error. It is 65 years old–eligible for Social Security. It uses Fortran (a computer language that is no longer popular). I think you can see that an update is needed (something the IRS readily acknowledges). (I was in the last Computer Science 1 class at Berkeley to use Fortran with punch cards. Berkeley switched to Pascal the following quarter.)
But the IRS is dependent on Congress for budgeting, and a stable IRS budget is absolutely needed. The IRS is an agency where politics should not apply, but over the last fifteen years we’ve seen Adminstrations use the IRS for political goals (such as the Lois Lerner/conservative nonprofits scandal, targeting of reporters who were investigating the Administration, etc.). The Party that has been out of power had one method to act and express displeasure–cutting the IRS’s budget–and they did.
I don’t have an answer here, but if you wonder why the IRS has issues and why things take far longer to resolve with the IRS than they should, you have one of the reasons. At times (especially when the IRS computer is down), I assume the whole thing is held together by duct tape (it can fix everything, right?). We’ll see if by the time I start taking Social Security if the IRS has a modern (or even semi-modern) main computer system.