Government watchdog blasts IRS for mismanaged migrations from Windows XP, Server 2003

Government auditors have blasted the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for missing deadlines to upgrade Windows XP PCs and data center servers running Windows Server 2003, both of which have been retired by Microsoft.

In a recently released report, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) criticized the IRS for spending nearly $140 million on upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7 even as it failed to meet the support cut-off of April 2014. At the deadline, over half of the IRS's PCs were still running XP.

Nine months after Windows XP fell off Microsoft's support list, the agency still could not account for 1,300 PCs -- about 1% of its total -- and so couldn't say whether they had been purged of the ancient OS.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here