The IRS receives 375,000 pieces of mail a day during its busy filing season, so when the letter-opening machines in the agency's Kansas City facility got too old to use it was a big deal.
Opening and sorting letters by hand took longer and some of those envelopes contained checks made out to Uncle Sam. The delays meant they weren't deposited right away, meaning the government missed out on interest payments it should have been collecting.
It all added up to real money.
The agency's inspector general said the government lost more than $400 million from 2019 through the middle of 2021 because of the delays.
From outdated air traffic machines to computers still running a 75-year-old computer programming language, the federal government is plagued with outdated technology.
It's now getting the attention of the world's richest man: Elon Musk, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named to co-lead his budget-cutting commission, the Department of Government Efficiency.
"The federal government computers & software are in such bad shape that they often cannot verify that payments are not fraud, waste or abuse!" he wrote earlier this month on X, his social media platform. "That's why the government can't pass basic audits. They often literally don't know where your tax dollars went. It's insane."
He said he's ready to step forward as Uncle Sam's new "volunteer IT consultant."
"This is a grind & hardly glorious, but we can't make government efficient & fix the deficit if the computers don't work," he said.
As recently as 2018 the Social Security Administration's computer systems still had 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, a programming language created in the 1950s. In other words, it's old enough to qualify for Social Security.
The agency says it has made some progress in retiring the code, but wouldn't say exactly how much.
"Per [National Archives] guidelines, SSA keeps source code for 7 years beyond the retirement of application, so only some of our more than 60 million of lines of COBOL code in our repository are still running in a production environment," the agency told The Washington Times in a statement.
However, Social Security said it needs more money to fund more upgrades.
That's a constant refrain from agencies, who say any large-scale improvements must come with investment on the front end.
That's the case at the IRS, where officials said a decade of budget cuts left the agency starved for cash, unable to answer taxpayers' phone calls and far behind the times with services offered.
President Biden and congressional Democrats aimed tens of billions of dollars at the agency in the 2022 budget-climate law, and IRS officials say they've been able to fix the phones, audit more people and improve their mobile device applications to make taxpayers' lives easier.
As for the letter sorting machines, the IRS said it had additional funding so it was able to install nine new machines by March.
"The out-of-service 20-year-old sorters were slower, experienced frequent breakdowns and outages, and were costly to maintain. The modernized and upgraded sorters have resulted in faster and more reliable service for taxpayers," the agency said.
Mr. Musk has signaled he's also worried about the software the IRS is using. After a user posted a picture of a computer running Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system, Mr. Musk replied "I wish. Unfortunately, it's much worse than that."
Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, one of Congress's top waste-watchers and founder of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which plans to work with Mr. Musk on reforms, said the tech problems are a matter of willpower, not resources.
"Washington's tech troubles are just another symptom of misplaced priorities," the Iowa Republican said. "Despite running IT systems billions over budget that either belong in a museum or are short-circuiting, federal agencies had no problems procuring every gadget necessary to allow millions of bureaucrats to telework."
At the Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers still use paper strips to help shepherd planes through the skies. The agency is in the middle of a phaseout, but it's taken time and paper will be used for some years.
The result is a little bit of inefficiency built into every flight, Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, said during a 2023 hearing on the issue.
"Just about every commercial air flight is longer than it needs to be. That they have to route planes further apart because the system can't track them," he said. "They're not using GPS widely. And that as a consequence of that, on every flight that's taking off, it's taking longer for every passenger, which means we're wasting millions of man-hours that could be used productively doing something else. We're spending millions of gallons of fuel, which is driving up costs for everyone buying a ticket on an airplane."
But rushing upgrades isn't always the answer, either.
The Bureau of Land Management, a part of the Interior Department that runs oil and gas exploration leases on federal lands, sought in 2013 to modernize its lease tracking system. Eight years later it declared the attempt a failure.
It came in at triple its original budget, was four years behind schedule and ended up requiring an additional 500,000 hours of labor a year to complete all the tasks, according to the Government Accountability Office. Things were so bad that the agency relied instead on paper records, GAO said in an audit in September.
At Veterans Affairs, an attempt to upgrade its health record system has gone haywire.
The new system has mucked up scheduling for some veterans' appointments, and department officials have connected several deaths to the snafus.
The cost of the system has also soared, from an initial $16 billion estimate to now perhaps close to $50 billion, the GAO said in September.
Mr. Ernst said that was an embarrassment.
"If the VA can provide laptops for managers to teleconference from bubble baths, then there is no excuse for the agency's failing electronic records system to the detriment of our veterans," she said.