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This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "sa

by jmclnx 2y ago

This will not end well. The IRS has tried many times to replace their mainframe systems and failed. So they are upgrading to AI ? I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language. AI definitely won’t help with that.
  - jonfromsf 2y ago
    AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      > IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_convert/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...
      - dartos 2y ago
        Also from that article > IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability. It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.
        fragmede 2y ago
        there's https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter if you prefer python
        dartos 2y ago
        > It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.
      - Neywiny 2y ago
        Not that Java is dead but that is reminiscent of the futurama professor invention of translating one dead language into another.
      - jmclnx 2y ago
        All well and good, but the system deals with money. You cannot have rounding issues. For non COBOL systems, rounding issues are a big issue.
    - dartos 2y ago
      AI is okay at it. It is one of the things they are best at. Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets. It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  The software is was written in the 60s and patched, patched, patched... I knew someone who worked on it, he passed away in the late 90s. Plus tax laws change every year, in many cases causing massive changes. Every conversion failed because no one is left fully understands the whole system. Plus for a conversion, you need a long quiet time, with the tax laws you never get that. Not to mention, even with Biden's additional funding, which I am sure it will be cut, it is far from the amount needed for a successful project. So here we are. I think some "modernization" has occurred, but the core system is still running some 60 year old software. Note, I knew a lot of people who worked there prior to 2000, so maybe what I know is a bit out of date. But I doubt it since the attempts I have read about over the past 20 years did not succeed.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The tax code is legislation and they're the government. Instead of trying to translate it from old COBOL spaghetti code, discard the existing code and implement a new system from the tax code. And while you're having a bunch of lawyers go through the tax code in order to do this, have them recommend simplifications to make it easier, so that instead writing new complicated software, you write new simpler tax laws.
    - econ 2y ago
      Estonia
  - hindsightbias 2y ago
    The IMF and BMF aren’t just software. They’re the code in tax code. It’s the law, not the printed thing in a binder. If you have the gall to question IMF behavior vs printed tax code and write it up internally, you will get a reply from an tax code analyst in a couple of months from WV explaining why you’re wrong, selections from code, selections from IRS legal interpretations, applicable court cases past, present and pending. It’s all very polite, but you quickly realize they’re lawyers and you aren’t.
- caspper69 2y ago
  A big part of the failure is that the system is not entirely digital, and not entirely automated. People can still submit paper returns (and this is common for any businesses beyond a certain size- I've seen 200+ pages for a small-ish company's return). Supporting documentation and schedules can be non-standard (like receipts, letters, exhibits, spreadsheets, contracts, etc.), and the forms themselves can be hand-written and the other docs can be on inconsistent paper sizes so bulk ocr of any kind is rough. Really, you have several challenging problems- maybe 200M individual returns filed every year, who knows how many corporate returns, all of the daily/monthly/quarterly filings for payroll, then for tax season you have an army of temp workers who are responsible for doing manual data entry which is cumbersome. Then you have the financial management/reporting/reconciliation side of it. The volume is staggering. Electronic transfers in both directions, handling paper checks both to and from taxpayers. More manual data entry for manual payments. And the kicker of all this is that it actually works for some pretty reasonable value of that term. And everyone here knows what the code probably looks like and we definitely know what the code's documentation looks like. How would you like to sit down with the nearly 7,000 pages of the US Tax Code and start taking a bite of that monster? It's not a reference manual- the amount of cross referencing with other laws and regulations required would be monumental. So, you are correct, AI is definitely not the answer; But I suspect the AI is for rooting out tax cheats (or maybe certain tax cheats), not running the system itself.
conradev 2y ago
> These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed. The IRS gets 125 million paper forms every year: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/tax-season-irs-digitizing-paper/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/tax-season-irs-digit... They tried and failed to scan some of them with OCR: "OCR – This project involved extracting machine-readable data from low-resolution and poor-quality images (both digital and paper) with the capability to integrate them with the IRS’s information technology systems and intake different types of forms and data. The pilot project was discontinued in October 2022 after failing to identify acceptable solutions using the vendor and resources provided. The ED&CMO has no plans to resume this effort at this time." https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-09/202310050fr.pdf https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-09/20... I imagine that a few GB200s would actually help with that effort
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  The 1040EZ was being OCR’d forty years ago. It doesn’t scale to 1040s and schedules because today’s biologics don’t know how to write anymore.
DeepYogurt 2y ago
> I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. What made you think that?
- jmclnx 2y ago
  Everything his boss Musk says :)
Frummy 2y ago
The people maintaining the systems could use AI to grapple with transforming it faster, no? I mean, if you have to rewrite existing programs from 1995 all the time you might as well feed an AI the context and get some suggestions and just verify and test the changes instead of manually with pen and paper jotting out the tree of the sections and the database relations and how the architecture requires it to be and what new legislations need to be accounted for in what way etc etc.. So AI can be used to speed up transforming the existing infrastructure instead of AI doing the actual processing which would obviously be not the direct use case in anyones mind It could also be implemented in less volumous tasks, like specialised scenarios like complex cases of fraud detection idk
tombert 2y ago
They never actually define what “efficiency” means, so it can be anything they want, and then they can claim any victory they would like by playing with numbers and definitions.

by jmclnx 2y ago

johnnyanmac 2y ago

Why do they keep failing? Don't tell me it's also COBOL that no one knows (or rather, isn'tpayong enough to remaining experts to know). I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.

throwup238 2y ago
The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language. AI definitely won’t help with that.
- jonfromsf 2y ago
  AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_convert/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...
    - dartos 2y ago
      Also from that article > IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability. It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        there's https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter if you prefer python
        dartos 2y ago
        > It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.
    - Neywiny 2y ago
      Not that Java is dead but that is reminiscent of the futurama professor invention of translating one dead language into another.
    - jmclnx 2y ago
      All well and good, but the system deals with money. You cannot have rounding issues. For non COBOL systems, rounding issues are a big issue.
  - dartos 2y ago
    AI is okay at it. It is one of the things they are best at. Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets. It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.
jmclnx 2y ago
The software is was written in the 60s and patched, patched, patched... I knew someone who worked on it, he passed away in the late 90s. Plus tax laws change every year, in many cases causing massive changes. Every conversion failed because no one is left fully understands the whole system. Plus for a conversion, you need a long quiet time, with the tax laws you never get that. Not to mention, even with Biden's additional funding, which I am sure it will be cut, it is far from the amount needed for a successful project. So here we are. I think some "modernization" has occurred, but the core system is still running some 60 year old software. Note, I knew a lot of people who worked there prior to 2000, so maybe what I know is a bit out of date. But I doubt it since the attempts I have read about over the past 20 years did not succeed.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The tax code is legislation and they're the government. Instead of trying to translate it from old COBOL spaghetti code, discard the existing code and implement a new system from the tax code. And while you're having a bunch of lawyers go through the tax code in order to do this, have them recommend simplifications to make it easier, so that instead writing new complicated software, you write new simpler tax laws.
  - econ 2y ago
    Estonia
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  The IMF and BMF aren’t just software. They’re the code in tax code. It’s the law, not the printed thing in a binder. If you have the gall to question IMF behavior vs printed tax code and write it up internally, you will get a reply from an tax code analyst in a couple of months from WV explaining why you’re wrong, selections from code, selections from IRS legal interpretations, applicable court cases past, present and pending. It’s all very polite, but you quickly realize they’re lawyers and you aren’t.
caspper69 2y ago
A big part of the failure is that the system is not entirely digital, and not entirely automated. People can still submit paper returns (and this is common for any businesses beyond a certain size- I've seen 200+ pages for a small-ish company's return). Supporting documentation and schedules can be non-standard (like receipts, letters, exhibits, spreadsheets, contracts, etc.), and the forms themselves can be hand-written and the other docs can be on inconsistent paper sizes so bulk ocr of any kind is rough. Really, you have several challenging problems- maybe 200M individual returns filed every year, who knows how many corporate returns, all of the daily/monthly/quarterly filings for payroll, then for tax season you have an army of temp workers who are responsible for doing manual data entry which is cumbersome. Then you have the financial management/reporting/reconciliation side of it. The volume is staggering. Electronic transfers in both directions, handling paper checks both to and from taxpayers. More manual data entry for manual payments. And the kicker of all this is that it actually works for some pretty reasonable value of that term. And everyone here knows what the code probably looks like and we definitely know what the code's documentation looks like. How would you like to sit down with the nearly 7,000 pages of the US Tax Code and start taking a bite of that monster? It's not a reference manual- the amount of cross referencing with other laws and regulations required would be monumental. So, you are correct, AI is definitely not the answer; But I suspect the AI is for rooting out tax cheats (or maybe certain tax cheats), not running the system itself.

conradev 2y ago

> These are finanical systems, they need to add/subtract and multiply/divide lots of transactional data. AI not needed. The IRS gets 125 million paper forms every year: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/tax-season-irs-digitizing-paper/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/tax-season-irs-digit... They tried and failed to scan some of them with OCR: "OCR – This project involved extracting machine-readable data from low-resolution and poor-quality images (both digital and paper) with the capability to integrate them with the IRS’s information technology systems and intake different types of forms and data. The pilot project was discontinued in October 2022 after failing to identify acceptable solutions using the vendor and resources provided. The ED&CMO has no plans to resume this effort at this time." https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-09/202310050fr.pdf https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-09/20... I imagine that a few GB200s would actually help with that effort

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hindsightbias 2y ago
The 1040EZ was being OCR’d forty years ago. It doesn’t scale to 1040s and schedules because today’s biologics don’t know how to write anymore.

DeepYogurt 2y ago

> I thought Trump was the "save waste" guy. What made you think that?

jmclnx 2y ago
Everything his boss Musk says :)

Frummy 2y ago

The people maintaining the systems could use AI to grapple with transforming it faster, no? I mean, if you have to rewrite existing programs from 1995 all the time you might as well feed an AI the context and get some suggestions and just verify and test the changes instead of manually with pen and paper jotting out the tree of the sections and the database relations and how the architecture requires it to be and what new legislations need to be accounted for in what way etc etc.. So AI can be used to speed up transforming the existing infrastructure instead of AI doing the actual processing which would obviously be not the direct use case in anyones mind It could also be implemented in less volumous tasks, like specialised scenarios like complex cases of fraud detection idk

tombert 2y ago

They never actually define what “efficiency” means, so it can be anything they want, and then they can claim any victory they would like by playing with numbers and definitions.