Thursday July 1, 3:46 pm Eastern Time

States enjoy bugless entry into fiscalStates enjoy bugless entry into fiscal Y2K

CHICAGO, July 1 (Reuters) - The switchover to fiscal 2000 on Thursday appears to have arrived virtually free of Year 2000 bugs, government officials said Thursday.

``Nobody has had any meltdown,'' Gloria Timmer, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said.

Concerns had been raised, six months ahead of the calendar's switch to 2000, because 46 states and many local governments on Thursday began fiscal year 2000.

Technicians were on hand in case the date triggered any lurking millennium bugs not yet discovered by months of reprogramming and testing.

But the budget officers group said it surveyed 15 states, including New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia, and found everything running smoothly.

``It's a little soon to know for sure, but it looks good,'' Timmer said.

Officials in Illinois and Kansas told Reuters they would not have a good reading on computer performance until late Thursday.

Tom Rubel, who has been watching the Y2K issue for the National Governors Association, said states were reporting things were running normally as they began processing bills, payrolls and other programs against fiscal 2000 appropriations.

Many computers were programmed to recognize only the last two digits of the year, and state and local governments have spent millions of dollars to replace, repair and test their systems so they will not confuse dates in 2000 with 1900.

-- No (Problem@atAll.com), July 01, 1999

Answers

If true, GOOD! !!!!!

-- maybe not 2000 (morecans@beans.rice), July 01, 1999.

I am a Polly, but I think it is too early to judge this and to start crowing yet. I think we should give it at least two or three weeks before judging the success of the July turnover.

Robin Messing

-- Robin S. Messing (rsm7@cornell.edu), July 01, 1999.

come on maybe. you gotta admit you're just a little disappointed. be honest now. looks like the inlaws were right about you, you nutty rascal.

-- corrine (corrine@iwaynet.net), July 01, 1999.

Yeah, big deal. Change the fiscal year end to 12/31/99 and you get 6 more bug-free months to work on it.

-- Fat_C (f@chance.com), July 01, 1999.

Fat C - that's sounds over-simplistic. Isn't there a whole lot more involved in just arbitrarily changing dates? Wouldn't that totally wipe out the present accounting?

-- justme (finally@home.com), July 01, 1999.

I don't know. Any geeks out there that can give a hint on the difficulty of changing the fy end date?

-- Fat_C (f@chance.com), July 01, 1999.

Until "the checks are in the mail" from the various state agencies, nobody can pronounce the fitness of anything regarding possible fiscal year 2000 glitches. The statement regarding the lack of a "meltdown" is absurd -- fiscal year glitches don't affect firmware, hardware, nor operating system software; just financial applications.

Now, if folks don't get their welfare checks, that might lead to a meltdown of sorts.... Give it time, see what happens.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), July 01, 1999.

There is no way possible they could declare success this early. I'm speaking of the mainframe side. Computer shops run on schedules. There are jobs(programs) that run daily, weekly, monthly etc. NO organization runs every application they have 'daily'. Pure bull.

-- RB (R@AR.ST), July 01, 1999.

For what it's worth, Jack, I provide network support for a certain state government. In my division is production services - they had no strange processing problems this morning. And all checks and ftps to banks went on their way as usual. We had slight problems with an area of our payroll system not recognizing the fiscal year (the portion affected was a part of the time-entry system for state employees). I can post an update when this is ironed out if it makes anyone feel better. I think the main area of concern for state government and the private sector is the possibility of bad data that may (or may not) be uncovered over the next few weeks and months. After this morning I'm feeling much more confident about the rollover, however.

-- Jenny (jgig@aol.com), July 01, 1999.

Agreed RB. There are still many production cycles and jobs that need to be worked through, so declaring "success" is premature. But month end processing and end of quarter processing did happen for many shops last night. As I wrote above, I feel better about the rollover after this morning; hopefully our shop is a fair indicator.

-- Jenny (jgig@aol.com), July 01, 1999.

Jenny, that's wonderful news! Now, if our Federal government is able to do that well... (of course we're just talking about financial/accounting type software, but that's a great start!)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), July 01, 1999.

There is a trick that can be used on computer systems to delay a fiscal year rollover from causing problems until at least the last quarter. The end dates of the fiscal months that are supposed to be after 12/31/1999 can be moved temporarily into 1999. For example, the end dates for fiscal months 7 thru 12 can be moved from January thru June to say December 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. Each of those months will be only 1 day long in the database, but they will not cause fatal errors. However, as we get closer to the end of the year, this trick will start to cause more and more problems because events will be scheduled too close to each other.

-- Mr. Adequate (mr@adequate.com), July 02, 1999.

adequate,

no charges of false advertising with a handle like that. i commend you. you may be the most honest man in america.

an honest, sincere cheek pinch you stature of sincerely.

-- corrine l (corrine@iwaynet.net), July 02, 1999.

Isn't Timmer the one quoted yesterday saying something like "you can key in 2000 in a column as easy as any other date" or along those lines? Sounds like the most complex thing she could imagine was a spreadsheet. Sorry, that doesn't impress me.

Glad we got through day 1 with no *reported* problems. Let's see how we look about the second week of August, when any July EOM problems will be very hard to keep quiet. If there are no such problems, I'll be delighted, 'cause I really want the world to go on pretty much like it is!

Fat C, Mr Adequate. I suspect you don't have a clue, but perhaps it depends on the system. It's real hard for me to imagine in a big iron setting -- when I worked for a large retailer, all this was set in stone. Maybe some apps have a table (Access comes to mind), where you enter the start and end days of each quarter, etc, but that's lots more trouble to code than just hard-coding the calc to figure out EOM, EOQ, EOY.

Adjusting end-dates appears to be what several (8?) states are doing with unemployment, but those are individual claims that can be individually set. Even so, if this fix is possible, sites will certainly use it to (1) keep the thing running and (2) keep a lid on problems.

Failures will be announced only when all other courses of action have been tried.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), July 02, 1999.

bw,

During my 20 years of experience as a programmer, every system that I worked on stored its fiscal calendar in a database or flat file. In most cases, there was a program that populated the dates based on the number of weeks in each fiscal month. Those programs typically required that each fiscal month began on a Monday, had 4 or 5 weeks, and that the year had 52 or 53 weeks. However, it was always possible to use utility programs to go around the system and set the dates to whatever values we wanted them to be. In the past there was no need to do this. I am speculating that companies and government agencies that are behind might be temporarily changing the dates until the can (hopefully) fix the system. As you noted, many states are already doing something akin to this to their unemployment compensation systems.

-- Mr. Adequate (mr@adequate.com), July 03, 1999.

An article that includes info on two July 1st glitches, and an article that has info on how states use fiscal year dates are on this thread:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00122f

"Significance of States Fiscal Start"

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 03, 1999.