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One Australian government official speculates that if the noncompliant welfare system is not compliant by June of 1999, the government may have to write 2,000,000 checks each month by hand.
I wonder how this could be done?
In the United States, it would be 80,000,000 (Medicare), plus 42,000,000 (Social Security), plus Medicaid, non-Civil Service government retirement, etc.
This is from THE AUSTRALIAN (April 7).
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MORE than $39 billion in annual Federal Government pensions and payments, including pay to 800,000 unemployed, are in doubt if Centrelink fails to solve millennium bug problems before January 1, 2000.
Centrelink's Y2K Issues Steering Committee chairman Martin Kos has set a self-imposed deadline to fix the bug before June 30.
"This gives us a year in operating mode for our 200 IT staff to carry out systems testing on 25,000 PCs scattered throughout Australia, on 10 Unix systems and on our six mainframe computers," Mr Kos says.
"If we haven't got it right, then six million Australian recipients, including 1.7 million old-aged pensioners and 500,000 disability pensioners would go without income support.
"Although if the worst happened, we could always write the cheques out by hand."
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