IRS extends filing after systems crash
Taxpayers can still submit returns until end of day today.
The Internal Revenue Service will let taxpayers submit their tax returns without penalty through the end of the day today, delaying the deadline a day after widespread failures of the agency’s systems for electronically filing returns.
The agency’s electronic filing system came back online early Tuesday evening, but for much of the day, the agency’s online channels for direct tax payments, electronic filings and submissions filed via TurboTax and H&R Block were all not working.
The failure of the IRS online system for submitting tax returns complicated filing for the millions of taxpayers attempting to meet the government’s midnight deadline.
“On my way over here this morning, I was told a number of systems are down at the moment,” IRS Acting Commissioner David J. Kautter told lawmakers at an oversight hearing Tuesday. “We are working to resolve the issue and taxpayers should continue to file as they normally would.”
Kautter said the agency was struggling to accept returns from the widely used tax software program TurboTax and the massive tax preparation company H&R Block.
Taxpayers can use the services to complete their filings, but the filings are not being transmitted from the companies to the IRS, Kautter said.
The agency discovered the problem early Tuesday morning. The agency will not punish people if their returns arrive late because of the glitches, Kautter said.
The IRS expected approximately 5 million people to file their tax returns Tuesday.
Two senior government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the potential causes, said initial assessments suggested the problems stemmed from internal technology failures. One of the officials said it appeared the system crashed due to large numbers of people filing.
The full extent of the failure remains unclear. The website for the agency’s “Modernized eFile” system for filing returns online on Tuesday said the system was not working. “The MeF System is currently down. We are working this as a priority.”
The agency’s system for direct online tax payments was also malfunctioning. “This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience,” the agency wrote in a notice at the top of its online payment page.
For several hours Tuesday, a separate, erroneous page in the IRS’ online payment section described a “Planned Outage: April 17, 2018 - December 31, 9999.” The IRS removed all links to that page shortly before 3 p.m.
A spokeswoman for Intuit, the company that owns the TurboTax software, said taxpayers should continue as normal.
The IRS has more than 60 different IT systems for managing the cases of individual taxpayers, according to a report submitted to Congress by an internal IRS watchdog. Many of them have not been updated in decades, and two of them are nearly six decades old — the oldest anywhere in the entire federal government, the report said.