You know we got too much money when the development and launch cost one BILLION Norwegian Kroner ($173 681 978), paid by the end user, the taxpayers..... I feel sort of cheated..
You should note that in Norway, your income statement is a public record (at least as far as I know; I live in Sweden where this is definitely the case, and Norway has a very similar system). This means that anyone can walk into the tax office and demand to see any piece of paper, including anyone's tax returns, and they're not allowed to ask who you are or why you want to see it. The reason for this (which to most Anglo-Saxons seems like having a nude picture of yourself posted on your garage door) is that the taxman is regarded, in a very real sense, to be a servant of the people. That is, the people - every single citizen - employ and own the authorities, and is entitled to inspect their behaviour on a whim. "By and for the people" isn't just an empty phrase.
@Pelotard: Yes, the tax records are (somewhat) public. You get to see a person's income before tax, how much was paid in taxes, and how much value (estates, cars, savings etc) that person has. HOWEVER, these data are all from the pre-correction phase. This mean that in cases where people document that they get xxxx amount of money returned, it will not show on these data. Also, the data Altinn managed to display on "Kenneth" were way more comprehensive than anything you will ever see from checking a persons tax record.
Update: It is estimated thet 1500-2000 people got access to "Kenneth"'s information during the 17 minutes before the site was shut down. It's determined that server caching caused the problem. Altinn was back up at 11am, local time on Friday. Caching has been disabled on this server which means it will perform even worse than before. Companies, the biggest usergroup of Altinn's services has got an extension on the deliver date for their taxes. At one point thursday evening, it was decided to print every tax statement and send them to the recipients by snail mail. This will cost 2 million NOK. It is unknown whether this will have any repercussions on the people responsible.
...so the "server" caching Kenneth's data, was actually the F5 BigIP load balancer (. I'm no fan of Accenture, the distinguished vendor behind the unscalable Altinn-behemoth, but let's give "credit", where "credit" is due - this was a case of the BigIP-boxes performing "queue management" (because the back end system couldn't handle the load) failing under the pressure. Caching was never supposed to be enabled on these boxes - it "kicked in" under very high load. It was an unknown bug in the BigIP-software - off-the shelf components, used in lots of large installations. "Performance" (if you can apply such a word to Altinn) won't be affected by this caching being disabled.
The company responsible is now looking for 29 new employees in the ICT-sector, among them technical project managers, senior architects, and test managers. Something for currently unemployed/IC-members looking for new jobs?
Jokke
Bergen, Norway Icrontian
Comments
I'm surprised that they continue to try to maintain without appropriate capacity considering the complaints they've gotten right from the start.
Edit: The PragtasticKenneth pic is classic.
Kenneth gon' be pissed.
Update: It is estimated thet 1500-2000 people got access to "Kenneth"'s information during the 17 minutes before the site was shut down. It's determined that server caching caused the problem. Altinn was back up at 11am, local time on Friday. Caching has been disabled on this server which means it will perform even worse than before. Companies, the biggest usergroup of Altinn's services has got an extension on the deliver date for their taxes. At one point thursday evening, it was decided to print every tax statement and send them to the recipients by snail mail. This will cost 2 million NOK.
It is unknown whether this will have any repercussions on the people responsible.