This information came from an article on page 8 of the Nov. 2003 issue of Tax Hotline. It is paraphrased, we have not checked it independently, and we take no responsibility; we merely thought it might be interesting.
Apparently, the IRS gave a major modernization project to some big computer consulting firm (the article didn't say which one) which then subcontracted much of the work to IBM. The results did not work right and wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and years of work.
Back when we were just one corporation, we worked on the IRS's Electronic Filing System. We added some enhancements, fixed several problems including a major security leak, and showed them how to increase capacity 50% at no extra cost by getting rid of wasteful coding practices. We also saved their bacon when the EDX Directory Bug (an IBM system software error that acts like a virus) ate several tax returns and threatened all the returns on the machine.
Perhaps they should have used us for this project.