IT and taxes

As I read this morning that yet another of President Obama's cabinet nominees is haunted by the spectre of tax problems, I suspiciously eye the stack of paperwork sitting on my desk which represents my own impending bout with the Tax Man and feel a pang of kinship and sympathy with the embattled Messrss Geithner, Daschle, and Ms. Killefer. I know that the popular conception of these folks is as lazy fat cats who have been using their superior intellect and financial resources to dodge the system for years and have had it finally catch up to them, while the honest, hard-work Joe Plumber types have been faithfully plugging away and doing their best to shoulder the unpaid load left by the tax-dodging wealthy, but I am having trouble buying into that model. Perhaps it is because I see taxes and Information Technology being so similar in some ways, and I know enough not to think ill of those having problems with their technology.

The basic similarity is that both systems have become wickedly complex. With respect to taxes, I find it difficult to believe that most taxpayers, if audited so deeply as the cabinet nominees, would not have similar breaches in the discharge of their obligations to the State. The tax code has become so famously complicated and so fabulously poorly defined and documented, that the traditional American springtime exercise of doing one's own taxes cannot help but result in some oversight and misallocation. I just helped a friend with the Washington State and City of Seattle Excise tax forms last week, models of clarity and simplicity compared to the federal documents, and even within those there was tremendous ambiguity and misdirection. After three hours of research and concentration, I still couldn't swear to you they got filled out right. And there are no answers, no help, in making that determination. There are so many special cases, so many cut-outs and add-ins, that it seems almost impossible that even the massive bureaucracy which powers these collection efforts could produce satisfactory instructions, even had they the inclination to do so (if you have ever called any of them for assistance, state or federal, then you probably have a good sense of the exact degree of customer service inclination they possess, which is somewhere on the scale between slim and none).

This is a similar state to the technology industry. In fact, if you take a quick look at your 1040 form and then go read, say, Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 EULA, you will be pardoned for sharing my suspicion that Microsoft went right out and snapped up those IRS lawyers after they were done penning the tax forms so they could go to work 24/7 cranking out licensing agreements and product documentation. Starbucks may be falling on hard times overall, but they have a ready-made marketplace out here keeping software industry lawyers fueled up and ready to go.

It's not simply licensing, of course, but day to day operations that are afflicted with this complexity. You read that a system will do this and do that, but the devil is always in the details. "Maybe it will work, and maybe it won't" is more descriptive of the average technology project initiative in an industry where failure rates are still approaching 50%. Security is much the same, with the constant but poorly disclosed announcements of holes riddling the most common software and systems. Who can possibly keep up with it all?

This state of affairs has become its own sort of inequity, where though all are afflicted, only those unlucky enough to be examined will be persecuted for their failings. It's why we, at IMS, stress simplicity so forcefully... complexity is its own punishment. Unlike the tax code, however, in IT it is a ground state which has been reached only with the complicity of those affected... who have been willing, historically, to add a little something extra every time a special case came up. Systems built that way have become a house of cards, difficult and expensive to maintain in balance, a self-perpetuating bramble of patches and work-arounds that necessitate constant IT department attention... at commensurate cost.

We can't do anything about your taxes, but I would be willing to bet we can help you fix (and understand!) your overly complicated IT systems.