diff --git a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
index 3e376779ff..16b6c90eac 100644
--- a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
@@ -481,6 +481,9 @@ Release 2.1.0-beta - UNRELEASED
     of the entire Container in the startContainer call - YARN-684.
     (Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli via sseth)
 
+    MAPREDUCE-5220. Fix backward incompatibility for TaskCompletionEvent by
+    adding back setTaskID. (Zhijie Shen via acmurthy) 
+
   BREAKDOWN OF HADOOP-8562 SUBTASKS
 
     MAPREDUCE-4739. Some MapReduce tests fail to find winutils.
diff --git a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/mapred/TaskCompletionEvent.java b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/mapred/TaskCompletionEvent.java
index 02cba94c4e..96ab111a5c 100644
--- a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/mapred/TaskCompletionEvent.java
+++ b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/mapred/TaskCompletionEvent.java
@@ -105,7 +105,17 @@ public class TaskCompletionEvent
   public void setTaskId(String taskId) {
     this.setTaskAttemptId(TaskAttemptID.forName(taskId));
   }
-  
+
+  /**
+   * Sets task id.
+   * @param taskId
+   * @deprecated use {@link #setTaskAttemptId(TaskAttemptID)} instead.
+   */
+  @Deprecated
+  public void setTaskID(TaskAttemptID taskId) {
+    this.setTaskAttemptId(taskId);
+  }
+
   /**
    * Sets task id. 
    * @param taskId