Couldn't find a good existing thread for this one:

The IRS Says There’s Always Next Year (WSJ: Sept 12, 2024)

The code that powers the database was written in the 1960s by IBM engineers at the same time their colleagues worked on the Apollo program. The system runs on a nearly extinct computer language known as Cobol, and though it retains its basic functionality, maintaining it requires bespoke service. By 2018 the IRS had only 17 remaining developers considered to be experts on the system.

The agency has sought and failed to overhaul or replace the database since the 1980s. It spent $4 billion over 14 years to devise upgrades, but it canceled that effort in 2000 “without receiving expected benefits,” according to the Government Accountability Office.

I know of one insurance company that's leased two AS/400s from IBM and pay per query for quotes. They are petrified if they release a new codebase that any deviation from the original quotes will have second and third order consequences.

Only found that because I was providing training in Spark/Hadoop a while back and told, "Jase, this is great but it will never get implemented."...... then told me why.

So this does not surprise me in the slightest. Long live the AS/400!

Penny-wise, pound foolish at the top level in general, with disasterous consequences (e.g. NatWest/Ulster Bank outsourcing train wreck).
At the moment I am giving an OOA/OOD training (feels like history repeating itself) in the high-tech chip industry Eindhoven region.  The mother(in S.A.) of one of the students is retired and is hired by the local banks during crises but they will not offer her a permanent job.
I was a certified COBOL programmer in 1982.

The limit of the long term memory is about 25 years. Each new generation reinvents the wheel.
And Computer Science is not an engineering discipline.

The agency has sought and failed to overhaul or replace the database since the 1980s. It spent $4 billion over 14 years to devise upgrades, but it canceled that effort in 2000 “without receiving expected benefits,” according to the Government Accountability Office.
But did they (bean-counters) think it through?

There is a conscious effort in America to make sure that our tax system is horrible, so that even the people who pay barely anything in taxes will hate it ... and conflate their hatred with hating taxes.

Feature, not bug.

Penny-wise, pound foolish at the top level in general, with disasterous consequences (e.g. NatWest/Ulster Bank outsourcing train wreck).
At the moment I am giving an OOA/OOD training (feels like history repeating itself) in the high-tech chip industry Eindhoven region.  The mother(in S.A.) of one of the students is retired and is hired by the local banks during crises but they will not offer her a permanent job.
I was a certified COBOL programmer in 1982.

COBOL Contractors still command high money. Too much depends on it. 

At one stage they put Java wrappers around COBOL code, it's probably Python these days.
Feels like a fix..