Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 2, 1998
'Millennium bug' battle a case of too little, too late
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Y2K = $50 billion for USG. That is the latest expert estimate of what it will cost the federal government to defuse the millennium computer bomb. Contained in a report by one of the government's leading consultants on the year-2000 problem, known informally as Y2K, the figure is 10 times larger than the most recent estimate of the Office of Management and Budget to fix the "chrono-crash" -- $4.7 billion.
And the White House has yet to learn about the vanishing budget surplus.
Speaking on the condition that his name not be used, one of the top five consulting experts advising the government on remedial measures told The Washington Times that less than half of the federal agencies would be ready by the deadline of one second past midnight Dec. 31, 1999.
At the present rate, this expert said, the Department of Energy will have completed the fix in 2019 and the Defense Department in 2012.
Howard Rubin of City University of New York is one of the leading experts on the year-2000 problem and a consultant to the country's largest financial institutions.
"The government doesn't have a clue," he said. "I have told Vice President Gore that the 2000 election will turn on whatever disasters the [year-2000] crisis brings. To appear passive now is a recipe for defeat."
Triage to give mission-critical systems top priority has become the norm. With the world's largest payroll and an arsenal of air, land and sea weapons systems dependent on computers, the Pentagon will have spent more than $10 billion by the end of next year. The Pacific command alone is costing $1 billion -- all unplanned, out-of-budget expenditures.
On the first day of 2000, uncorrected computer programs will go back 100 years to Jan. 1, 1900. When computers were first used in commercial applications, microprocessing capacities were limited and the first two digits of a year were skipped to save space.
Year-2000 experts were once dismissed as prophets of doom and gloom. Government and business leaders assumed, mistakenly, that a computer geek would come up with a silver bullet.
But the doomsayers have been proven right. There are no shortcuts, only countless hours of highly skilled manual labor going through billions of lines of computer code to correct the dates that are found on almost every piece of electronic equipment.
Seventy-seven percent of Fortune 500 companies underestimated the dimensions and the cost of the problem.
Top U.S. corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars each to fix it -- and software engineers and programmers are still working in three shifts round the clock to beat the century's-end deadline -- only to discover the "connectivity" problem.
In today's seamless global electronic environment, those who have secured their systems will still be connected to systems whose operators either did not allocate sufficient resources to correct them or assumed that something as simple as two missing digits was bound to find a software solution. Even those who have done the work in time will find as they recover from millennium celebrations that their suppliers and customers' systems have crashed.
Most companies have tripled their estimated year-2000 costs in recent months. With acute shortages of software programmers, companies have been raiding one another's experts and offering six-figure salaries to the fixers.
Every facet of modern life will be affected -- stock markets, banks, utilities, telecommunications, public transportation, and the entire industrial plant throughout much of the developed and developing worlds. Computers do everything from monitoring heartbeats to printing payroll checks and approving credit card purchases. They land planes and track financial investments.
Peter de Jager, a top Canadian software specialist, was one of the early Judgment Day prophets in the early 1990s. Today, consultants under contract to the federal government agree with him that some 5 percent of U.S. companies and 20 percent of the rest of the world's businesses will go bankrupt in 2000.
Speaking at a recent investment conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. de Jager said, "Resources are finite as everyone has the same deadline. There are 340,000 qualified people in the world to do the work. A fixed deadline is an oxymoron in the [information technology] industry. ... The deadline is actually nine months away, not 21 months, as systems have to be given exhaustive tests."
According to a recent survey on the year-2000 problem, one out of two Fortune 500 companies does not yet have a detailed plan in place. Any company that begins processing its lines of code this week cannot physically complete the task by midnight Dec. 31, 1999.
"The Seven Pillars of the Computer Apocalypse" is a conceptual framework that is part of "Y2K Tool," put out by the Virtual Dynamics Corp. Besides business failures, vanishing investment records and grounded airlines, it sees jammed elevators in high-rise buildings, gas pumps that don't pump, and bank machines that reject personal identification numbers.
Despite its problems, the United States is far ahead of most other countries in confronting the problem. The United Kingdom has taken a few steps, the rest of the developed world fewer still, the developing world almost none at all.
Thailand, for instance, has yet to conduct a potential damage assessment, let alone budget funds for repairs. Bangkok officials were horrified to discover in a random test that all the country's criminal records would have been expunged.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced this week that his government would spend $160 million to help train some 20,000 "bug busters" to help companies correct the problem. Fifteen percent of Britain's microchip-controlled assembly lines failed the test of coping beyond 1999.
One of the British retail giants, Marks & Spencer, ditched the chain's entire stock of corned beef because all crates and individual cans had been bar-coded with an "02" sell-by date. The computers read that as 96-year-old corned beef.
Mr. Rubin said, "At least Blair appears to understand there is a crisis, but, like our own government, they are clueless. The amount budgeted is pitifully inadequate, and there isn't enough time left to head off the crisis if you start today."
Total estimated worldwide costs have jumped from $600 billion to $1 trillion to $6 trillion in less than a year.
New York state is spending $400 million on the fix; New York City, $200 million. U.S. commercial banks face a $10 billion bill, with $600 million for giant Citibank alone. The cost in Australia is put at $7.5 billion, while South Africa will have to pay $5 billion.
Locally, costs for Montgomery County, Md., are put at $50 million. Washington, D.C., say the wags, is not listed because its computers are down more frequently than up.
A number of experts believe that the Internal Revenue Service is already in such a mess that a flat tax in 1999 may be the only way to get ahead of the curve. Similarly in the European Union, there are growing doubts that members can cope simultaneously with the year 2000 and the planned adoption of a single currency, the euro.Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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