Today, a brief history of tech at the IRS, why it got so bad and how it's getting better.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Lily Dramalli.

If you asked for an extension on last year's taxes, the bad news is the filing deadline

was yesterday.

The good news, if you got it in, refunds are expected to get to you faster than they have

in recent years. The notoriously obsolete technology running the IRS is getting a massive update.

That's thanks in part to a $60 billion cash infusion from last year's inflation reduction act

or the IRA. We're talking about tech that was considered cutting edge in the 60s.

Assistant Professor Erica Newman of the University of Dayton told me the IRS needs all the

IT help it can get. Honestly, since 2010 or so, there's been kind of a significant

string of cuts to the budget of the IRS and what that's ultimately led to is a dramatic backlog

a reliance on a pretty archaic computer system that they're still using from the 1960s

and a lot of retirements of the IRS personnel, so they're just having some trouble keeping up.

Now, when the pandemic hit, they were also tasked with a number of government programs,

such as sending out stimulus checks and the advanced child tax credit payments,

things like that. None of those factors helped relieve that backlog. They in fact

exacerbated that. What was their technology like you mentioned that they had technology from

the 1960s? Frankly, I imagine a lot of Americans envision the IRS is running on some pretty old

systems. Definitely. Yes, like I had mentioned, the IRS is currently working on a system called

the individual master file IMF from the 1960s. And honestly, as early as the 1980s,

the idea of the IRS as a technologically savvy agency has sort of been put to bed. So

when the IRS first embraced technology in the 60s, they were sort of ahead of the curve,

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