The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
&gt; Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.<p>&gt; He says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment authority expired. By then he’d accepted another job.<p>(GS-15 is $103k-$134k. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalpay.org&#x2F;gs&#x2F;2017&#x2F;GS-15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalpay.org&#x2F;gs&#x2F;2017&#x2F;GS-15</a>)<p>So, basically: the IRS can&#x27;t fix its software because it can&#x27;t pay market rates for software engineers. It can&#x27;t pay market rates for software engineers not because it lacks the budget for it, but because Congress won&#x27;t let them. This is how it ends up with huge armies of bureaucrats doing things that could be easily automated.