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The agency also encountered difficulties tailoring software for the machines. IRS officials decided to rewrite 1,500 programs containing 3.5 million lines of code into COBOL, a more sophisticated computer language than the old system's assembly code. A team of 300 programmers was assigned to the monumental task. The new software was first tested at IRS headquarters in Martinsburg, W. Va., where a computer dedicated to experimenting with the programs had been assembled. After that testing, it was run on the new 1100/84s at an IRS regional office in Memphis. Finally, the software was installed at the agency's nine remaining processing sites. In April 1984, when programmers put all the pieces of the tax-return processing program together, IRS officials discovered that it would run only half as fast as needed. The agency then desperately threw all of its available programmers into a crash effort to improve the system's performance. It took the special team nine months to finish the task, and by then 1984 returns were already flooding in.
Amid all this turmoil, the IRS committed a basic mistake of the computer age: it did not have a sufficient backup. Because of tight budgets, the service did not have the money or the programmers to process tax returns on its old Honeywell and Control Data machines in case of emergency. Data processing experts outside the agency also feel that the IRS took an unreasonable risk by attempting to convert both its hardware and software in the same year. IRS officials now agree. Given the chance to do it over, Assistant Commissioner Laycock admits, he would postpone conversion to the new system for another year. Said he: "When we realized the equipment was not going to be delivered on time, we might have said, 'Let's do it next year,'"
Laycock says that all ten IRS processing centers are now back up to speed and that all refunds will be in the mail by May 30, after which time the Government is required to pay 13% interest on amounts due. That prediction may be a little too optimistic. A phone call to Tele-Tax, a Government service that allows taxpayers to query IRS computers for tax information, revealed last week that forms mailed to the IRS as early as Feb. 2 still have not been processed. --By Jamie Murphy. Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington