Via Wikipedia Commons.A D.C. couple was subjected to a nearly decade-long, Terminator-like tax nightmare caused by a computer system glitch, as a D.C. Court of Appeals judge wrote today.
As Zoe Tillman from the Legal Times reports, John and Sara Connor’s Shuman’s troubles “began when they filed an amended 2004 tax return seeking a $790 refund.” In 2007, the received a notice from the District of Columbia Office of Tax and Revenue saying they owed that amount. They contacted OTR, who admitted the mistake. But their 2007 refund was $790 short.
By October 2008, after the Shumans brought the case to the Office of Administrative Hearings, an OTR investigation “discovered that the incorrect offset notices had been sent to the Shumans as a result of the erroneous information, described at the outset of this opinion, which had been entered into OTR‘s computer system with respect to the
2004 tax year.”
“Specifically, the $790 refund that the District owed to the Shumans or 2004 had been mistakenly entered into the system as an amount owed by the Shumans to the District,” Judge Frank Schwelb wrote today. But even after this was recognized, the Shumans kept getting notices indicating they owed money.
By the following spring, they got another notice saying that $1,580 should be deducted from their 2004 tax refund. An OTR operations manager later explained, Schwelb writes, “that a glitch in OTR‘s computer system had caused the computer to generate the erroneous notices automatically. [OTR employee] Ms. [Pamela] Westray believed that she could override the automatic generation of the notices by suppressing the Shumans‘ account for 2004 and by ‘writing off’ the incorrect outstanding balance.”
“As we shall see, however, it turned out that she was mistaken; the computer system, though inanimate, would not be so easily diverted.”
Yes, this goes on and on, with the Shumans continuing to receive bad notices. At a May 2011 hearing:
OTR‘s witnesses testified that although OTR had tried on numerous occasions to correct the Shumans‘ accounts, the computer system would not allow the attempted corrections to be preserved. OTR had written off the $790 as uncollectable, but the computer system had failed to recognize the write-off once it appeared that money was available to pay off the supposed bad debt. OTR also presented testimony to the effect that the problems with the ten-year-old computer program could not be resolved unless it was replaced by an entirely new system. OTR, in other words, protested that it was powerless to control the actions of its own computers, and that there was nothing that OTR could do about it. As Mr. Shuman testified, however, “[i]t is a sad day when computers rule man. There must be human accountability for actions by governments. It is too simple to just blame a machine or program for one’s ills.”
OTR was eventually ordered by an administrative law judge to pay the Office of Administrative Hearings over $80,000, “the amount of money OTR erroneously claimed in Notices of Offset or distributed to [the Shumans] in erroneous checks.” But, as three D.C. Court of Appeals judges ruled today, that judge didn’t have the authority to make such an order.
Tl;DR? Let Schwelb sum it up for you.
In the 1984 film The Terminator – a work of fiction starring Arnold Schwarzenegger – artificially intelligent machines attempted to exterminate what was then left of the human race. In the appeal now before us, a man-made computer system did not go so far but, defying the will of those who programmed it, it caused significant grief and distress to those who had a right to rely on its accuracy. Unfortunately, the machine involved belonged to the branch of the District of Columbia government responsible for calculating and collecting citizens‘ taxes. In this case, we are charged with resolving a controversy that had its inception in an erroneous data entry made almost a decade ago into the computer system of the District of Columbia‘s Office of Tax & Revenue (OTR), and OTR‘s errant computer program has played a key role in the litigation.
Oh, and that glitch? OTR says it’s been fixed.
