A damning audit report provides the latest evidence of IRS mismanagement of the flood of sensitive documents and data it gets from taxpayers despite having a $1.8 billion information technology budget.
The federal tax agency doesn’t effectively keep track of the software it purchases, it buys more copies than needed and it sometimes deploys more copies than it is allowed, the report said.
“The IRS does not effectively manage server software licenses and is not adhering to federal requirements and industry best practices,” according to a new audit report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
“TIGTA estimates that the amount wasted because of the inadequate management of server software licenses is in the range of $81 million to $114 million based on amounts spent for licenses and annual license maintenance that were not being used,” the report said.
That’s just for servers. Previous IG audits focused on other areas of the IRS’s sprawling yet antiquated IT architecture, which includes aging desktops and mainframes, and found similar problems.
Those found that the IRS did not have an “accurate inventory of software” and it didn’t use available tools that would allow it to manage its licenses much better.
The IRS also lacked the basic email functionality afforded to virtually all ordinary email users, causing it to lose official emails from Lois Lerner, the now-retired senior executive at the center of the illegal targeting and harassment of Tea Party nonprofit applicants during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
In a congressional hearing about those emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said his agency’s inability to manage IT assets was due to the fact that $1.8 billion was not enough money.
“We are provided significant amounts of money but significantly less than we need,” he told Congress. House Republicans said it was more an issue of spending the money wisely.
The $100 million in waste identified in the latest report alone could immediately free up six percent of the tax agency’s entire IT budget to be re-appropriated as necessary.
In an unrelated lawsuit filing last week, the IRS disclosed that its programmers wrote an average of 473 lines of code a month — an incredibly low productivity in the industry.
Better in-house programmers could decrease its dependency on high-priced vendors like IBM, and the risks of having the government’s important data trapped inside someone else’s tools.
Earlier this year, the IRS had to pay Microsoft high rates for special service because it was still using Windows XP after the operating system giant stopped supporting it, despite years of warning that it needed to switch.
That means that not only does the IRS use 50,000 computers running a 12-year old operating system, but it is paying handsomely for it.
