IRS hires its first-ever CTO; who will be Obama's?
Terence V. (Terry) Milholland started a new job as the Internal Revenue Service's chief technology officer on Monday. No worries; he's already been CTO of organizations handling your money.
Milholland, a graduate of the University of Maryland and George Washington University, was previously executive vice president and CTO of Visa International. Before that, he served as CTO and CIO of EDS, around for the early days of the just-completed EDS-HP merger; before that, he was a 21-year veteran of Boeing, finishing his time there in 1999 as chief information officer.
Visa over its last four quarters handled 43,670,000,000 payment transactions totaling $4,188,000,000,000 -- that's right, 4.188 trillion dollars. During Milholland's time there, Visa helped solidify PCI DSS (the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), released a global specification for contactless payments via RFID-chipped cards, and cut the ribbon on Visa's one millionth ATM.
The IRS utilizes 400 systems for processing 200 million tax returns every year. Milholland will be the agency's first CTO.
One of Milholland's main challenges at the IRS is apt to be the task of whipping the IRS's over-budget and under-secured CADE (Customer Account Data Engine) system into shape. A close examination of the CADE and Account Management Systems earlier this year revealed not only a troubling number and breadth of security-related design flaws, but an agency history of ignoring vulnerability reports during the nine-year-and-counting CADE and AMS development processes.
The IRS is also consistently ranked near the bottom of the House Committee on Government Reform's annual federal security compliance report card. The agency's highest grade on that report was a string of D-minuses in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
According to Federal Computer Week, Milholland will report directly to James P. Falcone, the acting Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support. In turn, the Modernization and IT Services division, including CIO Arthur Gonzales (who strongly objected to the public release of the damning CADE report, going so far as to attempt to have it declared "Sensitive But Unclassified"), will report to Milholland.
Meanwhile, speculation continues over the top CTO spot in DC -- also a newly created position. The Obama transition team is revealing nothing, but among the names being thrown around by gossips are Internet father Vint Cerf, computer science professor and e-voting researcher Ed Felten, former Clinton-era FCC chair Reed Hundt, intellectual property professor and Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig, and Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is believed to have already expressed a lack of interest in the job.