The best part of Barron’s this week was this Letter to the Editor by Zvi J. Doron of
Pittsburgh:

Your May 8 issue carried a classified ad for a “streamlined critical pay position” at the Internal Revenue System, to help revamp that agency’s data systems.

The job title alone — Deputy Associate Chief Information Officer (CIO) For Enterprise Operations Modernization and Information Technology Services (MITS) — took 15 words, including two acronyms; the ad itself ran close to 500 words, including such bureaucratic gems as “efficient competency based uniform operating environment,” “stakeholders,” “mission-critical” and “enterprise system management operation”.

If this is what passes in the IRS for “streamlined,” is it any wonder that its data systems have been performing so miserably? And does anyone really believe that someone attracted by the language of this classified ad would be the right person to fix those systems?