<p>In the coming weeks and months, we might see DOGE reporting finding "fraud" in government agencies where the real crime is out-of-date, badly-maintained software, and not any criminal intent.

COBOL, you see, may be old, but it's far from dead. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), numerous vital government systems still rely on legacy software and hardware. Some of these systems are more than 50 years old.

These archaic systems include ones for the Department of Education for tracking students; the Department of Health and Human Services' clinical and patient administration; and Medicare & Medicaid Services still uses COBOL-based systems for critical operations.

Last but not least, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) still uses COBOL for some of its critical systems. Altogether, <a href="https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2021/06/irs-needs-cybersecurity-tools-secure-its-cobol-apps/174439/" target="_blank">the IRS still relies on approximately 160 COBOL applications</a>. At the IRS's heart is every taxpayer's Individual Master File (IMF). This is written not just in COBOL but in IBM Assembler as well. This is, in no way, shape, or form, easy code to work with. Complicating matters further, the IRS uses multiple versions of COBOL, including IBM COBOL for OS/390 & VM, IBM Enterprise COBOL for zOS, and Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Eclipse.

You might think that IMF, which dates back to the early 1960s, is the oldest computer system. You'd be wrong. The Department of Defense's computerized contract-management system, Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), is still with us after almost 67 years of service. That's even older than the official release of COBOL itself. MOCAS was written in beta COBOL.

In theory, the IMF was to be replaced by 2028. That was before DOGE cut 6,000 IRS employees out of the government agency's approximately 82,990 employees.

This problem isn't limited to just the Federal government. Forty-five of the 50 states and the District of Columbia still run COBOL systems. Many of you may remember when Covid first hit, and you couldn't get unemployment checks. More than likely, your money was delayed because of over-burdened COBOL-based unemployment programs.

None of this is COBOL's fault. It may be old, but COBOL is still useful. Indeed, when you get cash from an ATM, 95% of the time you're interacting with a COBOL program. Behind them, 43% of banking systems are written in COBOL, and 90% of banks still use some COBOL. It's not just banks. Insurance companies also rely on COBOL. This old programming language will not be leaving us this decade, maybe not this century. </p>

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