Billions of Dollars Later, IRS Lumbers Under Beatles-Era Tech

Four years ago, the IRS suffered a technology failure at the worst time: the final day of tax filing season.

For roughly 11 hours, dozens of vital IRS processing systems went down, including the agency’s ability to accept electronically-filed returns.

It wasn’t hackers that brought down the IRS on Tax Day 2018. Instead, a firmware bug caused the failure of a storage device that supports the agency’s nearly 60-year-old IT infrastructure.

Reliance on legacy systems increases the risk of future IT failures. But it also hinders the IRS on a daily basis, contributing to two of the agency’s ...