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Which part of the $3.5 trillion dollar-a-year processing system that interacts with 3.5 million businesses, tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper f
by andrewstuart2 6y ago
Which part of the $3.5 trillion dollar-a-year processing system that interacts with 3.5 million businesses, tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper forms, tax laws, jurisdictions, edge cases, bank transfers, etc, did you expect to come Off the Shelf.
I work for a large bank, and yes, we use OTS software here and there, but that's such a miniscule part of the overall solution (let's completely forget organizational politics out of it). Try a few solutions, pick one, and get down to business because that was maybe 5% of the work.
"Just pick a business rules engine" is easy to say, but the meat of this problem is still the rules: thousand to hundreds of thousands of individual tax codes, jurisdictions. That, and the countless inputs and outputs the IRS presumably already deals with.
Couple that with the fact that politically, where do you think your career is going if you move fast and break things, and mess up $3 trillion dollars of revenue across 143.3 million tax payers, including some of your boss' biggest campaign donors?
Not to say it couldn't be done faster, easier, if you could break through the legacy and politics, but that's a really big if, and it still leaves you with all the complexity of the tax codes to implement on whatever great stack you find.
- aejnsn 6y agoI am not referring to some sort of gateway, ESB, etc. I am referring to the patent application, which would be for a tool to port code from Assembly to another target language, the example they used being Java.
- andrewstuart2 6y agoI'm not sure what ALB assembly is, but I do know disassemblers themselves are kinda rare (which this really isn't either; more of a disassembler+transpiler). On top of that, whatever ALB assembly is, it kinda sounds like there might be only a market of one or two places in the world using it. Remember, they're saying these systems were put in place in the 60s and 70s. In 1960, COBOL was the new hotness -- modern day Go has 5 years more maturity than COBOL had in 1960, and there was no internet yet. Even ARPANET wouldn't be invented for another 9 years. Whatever was being written back then was not written by developers with the kind of access to information we have today. And definitely not with the kind of storage luxury we have today that permit us to document and comment as copiously as we want to.
- antonvs 6y agoALC (mentioned in the patent) is Assembly Language Coding, referring to various IBM mainframe assemblers. Disassemblers aren't rare, and certainly exist for the CPUs in question. But the patent is trying to produce structured Java code from handwritten assembly, which is definitely not something for which many OTS solutions exist.
- andi999 6y agoMaybe filing patents are generally encouraged for government jobs?
- rbanffy 6y agoThat's one way to prove output
- aj3 6y ago> tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper forms, tax laws, jurisdictions, edge cases, bank transfers, etc, Is there any evidence that this is the case though? I don’t have any evidence for the contrary either, but my own experience would suggest that the IRS system is likely bulky and inflexible behemoth that does not care least to be compatible with any other systems as all of those other systems are written to be compatible with what IRS have already. And whatever edge cases or gotchas there might be they are probably offloaded to internal bureaucracy.
- renewiltord 6y agoLet's be honest. The chance that this stuff is right is vanishingly small. It's probably just the case that all bugs are now features.
- throwaway744678 6y agoThere's a big incentive for the customers to report (half) the bugs they find, though.
- rbanffy 6y ago> thousand to hundreds of thousands of individual tax codes, jurisdictions. That's a good indicator that the system is being actively maintained.