An interesting exchange between the Inspector General's office on the Social Security Agency's use of CoBOL, its increasing use of Java, and its modernization efforts.  The facts presented as context are as important as the recommendations and conclusions, and underscore the importance of CoBOL to the financial industry. Also interesting is how the SSA's annual budget of $100M for operation and maintance for 60 million lines of code of CoBOL compares favorably to, and generally aligns with, Child Support Enforcement Systems of perhaps 2 to 3 million lines of code and a typical maintenance budget of maybe $5M to $15M a year.  

Other notable findings were "…the plans (of other federal agencies using COBOL) did discuss IT modernization. A common theme was the reuse and leverage of code via service-oriented architecture."
And interviews with leading financial firm executives stated "The IT executives provided several reasons to support their organizations' continued use of COBOL. First, they saw no alternative language capable of processing the enormous volumes of online and batch transactions. Furthermore, they noted that a
replacement effort would take many years and significant resources. Finally, the IT executives saw little business value for such a replacement effort. However, most of the IT executives stated that their companies used programming languages other than COBOL for new development."

Finally, the SSA rejected the IG's contention that there is a risk of an imminent shortage of CoBOL developers to replace those retiring. The IG states "SSA's human capital plan does not adequately provide for continuity of trained COBOL programmers."We disagree. We already conduct very thorough workforce planning. When and if COBOL programming skills appear in our analyses as a legitimate risk, then we will articulate appropriate remediations in our Human Capital Plan."