Questioning Gov't Tech Abilities

[imoldernu]

I'm mad at the US Treasury.
For many years the government provided the "Savings Bond Wizard". an excellent program that allowed US bond holders of any type bond, to bring up a single page that consolidated all of the details for all of the bonds you own.

As of April this year, they decided to, for who knows what reason, to discontinue this great program, and replace it with the "Savings Bond Calculator" glitchy and difficult to use.... a ten steps backward disaster.

Then... the final touch... YOU CAN USE THIS PROGRAM WITH SAFARI, FIREFOX, AND SEVERAL OTHER PROGRAMS, BUT IT WILL NOT WORK WITH CHROME.

Duh!... Our government doesn't have technical skills to make their own program work with the most popular browser?

All of this started back in April, and hasn't been correctd since.

BTW... a glitch in the newest Microsoft 10 version is known to possibly cause serious problems when running Firefox, and switching back to a different browser. Not a big problem so far, but noted on several tech websites... and happening especially on older computers.

 

[razztazz]

The Government hires private sector providers to do these things.

Which browser did the software designer have an interest in? etc etc etc

 

[MRG]

The government generally outsources their work, however they're in charge. Someone said, this is OK.

I don't think you experienced all the fun when they rolled out a non-funtioning healthcare.gov site, but I did. Damn thing had serious data integrity issues. That's like data processing 101. If you don't protect the data, why have a system?

I'm not sure who to even complain to. You have a valid concern.

 

[cathy63]

Having been a government contractor in software development, I can guess that the Savings Bond Wizard was old code that probably had some issue such a lack of Section 508 compliance or embedded code libraries that fail the newest HP WebInspect or Fortify scans. It was probably grandfathered in and ignored for a long time.

Then the government needed to add some new feature, maybe a new bond series or a change in the way they calculate interest or something, so they went through the acquisition process and issued a contract to update the app. If the vendor was lucky, they got the source code for the old tool. But all new software requires Section 508 compliance and security scanning and maybe even working with the 18F group to develop it in an agile fashion, so the old code was completely useless and everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. Everybody was so busy writing 508 and 18F into the contract they forgot to mention which browsers were required to be supported so the app was developed with whatever the vendor had on their laptops, which might be Macs. By the time they figured out that their tool doesn't work with Chrome's latest rendering engine, they were out of money.

Sadly, this is how it usually goes.

 

[joeea]

As of April this year, they decided to, for who knows what reason, to discontinue this great program, and replace it with the "Savings Bond Calculator" glitchy and difficult to use.... a ten steps backward disaster.

Then... the final touch... YOU CAN USE THIS PROGRAM WITH SAFARI, FIREFOX, AND SEVERAL OTHER PROGRAMS, BUT IT WILL NOT WORK WITH CHROME.

Duh!... Our government doesn't have technical skills to make their own program work with the most popular browser?

If you mean this site:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/BC/SBCPrice

It works fine using Chrome for me.

 

[RE2Boys]

If you mean this site:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/BC/SBCPrice

It works fine using Chrome for me.

If you build an inventory of bonds that you wish to save so that you can update the inventory at a future date, you need to be able to save the htm file with certain info included. Saving doesn't work under Chrome or MS Edge.

See: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/help/bc/bc_savings_help.htm

I've got eight inventories (different bond registrations) with well over 100 bonds that are now a royal PITA to update values with the loss of the Wizard. More info at https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=248455

Must remember to clear all browsing history between processing each inventory. Agree with OP, a disservice to us collectors of paper bonds.

 

[imoldernu]

If you build an inventory of bonds that you wish to save so that you can update the inventory at a future date, you need to be able to save the htm file with certain info included. Saving doesn't work under Chrome or MS Edge.

See: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/help/bc/bc_savings_help.htm

I've got eight inventories (different bond registrations) with well over 100 bonds that are now a royal PITA to update values with the loss of the Wizard. More info at https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=248455

Must remember to clear all browsing history between processing each inventory. Agree with OP, a disservice to us collectors of paper bonds.

OH!!!
Thank you...I thought I was the only one.

Took me more than an hour to figure out the instructions and then fight with Firefox to get it done.