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Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

I had to file some forms on irs.gov about a year ago, and the web portal was only open on weekdays between 9am and 5pm eastern time.

My fantasy explanation is that the form feeds directly into a printer, and they have a guy who takes the printouts, staples them, and puts them in a box. If the website is open 24/7 then when Stapleman shows up to work Monday morning the backlog might be discouraging. Not to mention if the printer jams during off hours and nobody's there to notice, filings may be lost. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

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The help desk for users outside the Service is only up during those hours weekdays and is constantly having its scope reduced. On the weekends the mainframe is processing several million transactions that went on during the week. Even though it is a Web 1.0-looking interface, those web-based bits are a peripheral to a fairly ancient mainframe running COBOL. That mainframe still updates several millions of individual accounts and cranks through millions upon millions of account updates at night and especially on the weekend.

Your fantasy explanation is way, way off the mark. Nothing is feeding into a hopper from a printer. It is just a huge mainframe that does many, many things for hundreds of millions of individual taxpayers as well as millions upon millions of businesses and other entity types.

[Is break over yet?]

This is the reason. Anyone who has been around long enough remembers "online hours" and "batch hours" on the mainframe.

A little more eco-friendly but no less insane explanation: the software processing forms is running on someone's regular work machine, which they turn on each morning, and then turn off when they go home...

The power options are controlled by group policy, and as yet nobody's been able to take a week off from their work to track down "the administrator" and convince them to add an exception.

In Japan, quite a few ATMs would not work during weekends and evenings, I've always speculated that they hired people to sit in the atm and hand over the money. It also would explain why credit card fees are higher when withdrawing money during weekends (in the few ATMs that allows you to do that)...

That is magical. I love it.

A while ago I had the pleasure of visiting a government office that indeed had such a box with the writing "internet" on its side, with printouts of all requests that arrived by email. But as far as I recall, the email server and printing were asynchronous, so I had that going for me...

Having worked in passing with the IRS and their tech groups, I can safely say this is the most plausible explanation I've heard for a site like that.

I realize you're speculating, but ...

I'm not sure if the IRS is trending towards a paperless office or not (is that even still a thing?), but triggering a print job for every form submitted via a web portal sounds very wasteful. I'd hope they have have some sort of workflow system in place instead.

Another theory I have involves concessions to webserver unions and/or acknowledging the need for time off to take care of the child processes. These fantasies are the only place I can find closure and sanity when my carefully filled out submission is rejected by the website because it is now 4:01 pm and that's Miller Time on the east coast.

You're actually closer than you realize :)

It's a government worker union thing. They don't have a contract for being called at 4am when the website breaks, so you better shut it off at 5pm.

If you think this is the stupidest thing in government you should ensure you never have to work in that environment over your lifetime :)

I'm not sure there are many government web services run by actual government employees.

The IRS hasn't had a budget in many years now. Congress passes emergency reauthorizations every year that's just enough to keep the lights on, but does not allow for any kind of long-term planning or upgrades. I'd imagine that, if they do have crazy systems like this, they'd love to get rid of them but can't.

FWIW Mnuchin wants to boost funding for the IRS: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/steven-mnuchin-makes-a-we...

It sounds good, but I'm going to wait for the budget to actually pass before popping the champagne. Considering everything we've seen so far, my confidence that Trump's appointees will actually live up to their smash-the-system claims, and not just be more crony capitalists, is quite low.

The weekend crew is too busy catching up on printing cover sheets and faxing the TPS reports.

> the web portal was only open on weekdays between 9am and 5pm eastern time.

Most likely: they don't have anyone on call outside those hours for breakages, so they only turn the system on during working hours.

The IRS has 79,890 employees. $12B annual budget. So...

edit: Another comment linked to a good explanation as to why the site isn't up 24/7. TL;DR legacy COBOL that everyone is terrified of touching. Just in case the Secretary of Treasury is reading this: I, for one, would gladly have my tax dollars go to modernizing irs.gov. Oh wait, I just remembered healthcare.gov. Nevermind.

Most Healthcare dot gov website issues were resolved later. Don't exaggerate.

Except that those issues were an un-exaggerated mess, originally. The emergency steps they took after launch pretty much proves the point.

Washington Post reports that $319 million has been spent on healthcare.gov. Is that sane?

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

It was a hugely complex site that had to manage and connect to a large number of existing systems for each insurer that was part of the market place. It also had to be done in an extremely short time frame because the details of the site and it's operation weren't solid until the law was signed.

Yes?

Far more has been spent on Facebook and Twitter (for example), and they don't do anything nearly as important as providing health care coverage to people.

My account still doesn't work and it won't let me continue further, claiming I do not exist.

"Better not have any unplanned downtime" --> "Make it all planned downtime, then..."

You joke, but that's exactly it. Not letting people submit requests at all is a lot better than silently discarding requests due to unexpected errors.

It's not [entirely] a fantasy

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