After IRS site fails, tax-filing deadline extended a day
The Internal Revenue Service extended its taxfiling deadline for all filers to midnight Wednesday after those who waited until Tuesday to pay their taxes online got an unwelcome surprise: The IRS website to make payments and access other key services was down.
The agency said no additional paperwork would be needed to extension.
The agency’s website for making payments and gaining access to other key services crashed amid the filing flood. The website appeared to be back to normal late Tuesday.
Earlier that day, the IRS said that “certain IRS systems are experiencing technical difficulties” due to a hardware issue.
“We’ll make sure taxpayers have extensions once the system comes up to get the one-day make sure they can use it and it in no way impacts people paying their taxes,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters in New Hampshire. “It was just a technical issue we’re working through. A high volume technical issue that impacted the system.”
Pages on the IRS website (www.irs.gov) used to view account information, make a direct payment or set up a payment plan were all not functioning most of the day Tuesday.
It’s unclear when and why the failure occurred. But it appears, based on a message on the site, that the online payment system became unavailable at 2:50 a.m. ET.
It’s unclear how many people were affected Tuesday but, by comparison, about 5 million tax returns were filed on the final day of last year’s tax season.
The IRS glitch also caused problems for popular third-party tax preparers such as Turbo Tax and H&R Block. Both said that they planned to hold onto customer tax returns and would file them as soon as the IRS system reopened.
Tax day fell on April 17 this year because April 15 was a Sunday and April 16 was Emancipation Day, a holiday in Washington, D.C.
IRS Acting Commissioner David Kautter testified during a House Oversight Hearing on Tuesday that the agency was working to resolve the issue.
Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow offered a deadpan reaction when asked about the failure.
“The IRS is crashing? Sounds horrible. Really bad,” he said during a briefing with reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I hope it gets fixed.”
The IRS typically recommends that taxpayers use electronic filing to avoid common mistakes. Online filing is quicker than the mail — when the site works.