The US government may take punitive action against financial companies if their IT systems are not Millennium-compliant and they fail in their fiduciary responsibilities to customers. Yet while it is prepared to hammer the private sector, a report released by the US Office of Management and Budget says that over 7,000 IT systems in government operations must be made ready for the year 2000, excluding those in the Social Security Administration which has been working on the problem since the late 1980s. It says around 75% of its systems are compliant. Other departments are ill-prepared, and of the 7,000 systems, only 21% are 2000-compliant, even with the usual disposal and replacement. Assuming new systems are 2000-ready, which is not a legal requirement, more than 4,500 US government systems are not set for the twenty-first century.
