WASHINGTON — It's said that nothing is so permanent as a temporary government committee. But Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, proved that wrong Tuesday.
He formally disbanded the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, which he chaired during its entire existence. He said the Y2K bug is dead, and the committee is no longer needed.
But as a last hurrah, it released a final report that said the Y2K bug actually created more mischief than many people realized — in part because many who had problems abroad didn't report it.
"We had more problems overseas than the press reported. There were many people who were simply embarrassed about their Y2K problems and didn't talk about it," Bennett told the Senate.
"Indeed, we have some examples before the committee of problems that did exist that were later denied simply because of the embarrassment that people felt," he said.
Examples of some problems abroad included in the report are:
Prison door systems failed in British Columbia.
Nuclear power plant control systems had problems in such places as the Ukraine, Russia and Spain.
Medical machines — including X-ray, diagnostic and dialysis machines — failed in such places as Bolivia, Botswana, Egypt, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico and Sri Lanka.
ATM machines would not dispense cash in such places as China, Namibia, Sweden and Norway.
Computers had glitches at the Islamabad Stock Exchange in Pakistan, and a Hong Kong futures exchange suffered an outage.
Fifteen percent of small businesses in France reported Y2K-related malfunctions, and 5 percent of private firms in Great Britain had problems.
Cash registers failed in Germany, Greece and Norway.
An Italian court system inadvertently erased all of its 1999 data.
Graduates at Korea University received graduation certificates dated 1900.
The committee reported, "It is interesting to note that official government reports from around the world report far fewer incidents than reported by news services.
"For example, 32 countries including Australia, Brazil, Great Britain, Canada, Germany and Norway reported no incidents on the official International Y2K Cooperation Center's Web site despite the fact that many incidents were reported in these countries by reliable news services," the report said.
Bennett noted that no major problems were experienced in the United States, although numerous minor problems occurred and persist, ranging from delays of Medicare payments in some states to double-billing by some credit card companies to 911 problems in some cities to degradation of a spy satellite system.
Bennett said problems could have been catastrophic without work by his committee to draw attention to the problem and hard work by businesses and government to fix programming problems.
The report said the United States spent $100 billion to fight the Y2K bug ($8.5 billion of it within the federal government).
Bennett said, "It was very much worth it" to avoid the problems.
While Bennett shut down his own committee, he urged President Clinton not to shut down the White House Y2K command center.
He said the federal government should keep it running as a focal point to combat cyber terrorism and other high-tech threats.
"The capabilities of this facility would be well-suited to dealing with the Information Age threats of hackers, cyber terrorism, cyber crime and information warfare," Bennett said.
He added, "The recent attacks against high-profile e-commerce Web sites demonstrate the need for a coordinated defense of America's robust, high-tech economy."