IRS taking returns again after Tax Day mishap

Computer system runs on 1960s code

SAN FRANCISCO – The IRS website is back up and running after a Tax Day glitch that prompted the U.S. government to give Americans a day’s grace to file.

The IRS hasn’t given an explanation for what halted parts of the site for much of Tuesday, except to say it wasn’t a cyber attack. But the surprise might be that the tax collection agency doesn’t suffer collapses more often, given that the underlying software dates to the early 1960s.

“The situation is analogous to operating a 1960s automobile with the original chassis, suspension and drive train, but with a more modern engine, satellite radio and a GPS navigation system. It runs better than the original model but not nearly as efficiently as a system bought today,” is how the IRS’ chief technology officer Terence Mulholland put it in testimony before Congress in 2016.

The IRS is in the midst of replacing legacy systems with a new system called CADE2, but it is behind schedule. Last year, IRS CIO Gina Garza said it would take another five years.

The upshot of Tuesday’s outage was that many who waited until the last minute to file their 2017 tax return and make a payment on the IRS website were stymied, leading to the unusual extension.

The payment portion of the site was offline from the early morning hours of Tuesday until around 5 p.m. ET. The glitch affected the tax agency’s Direct Pay system, which lets people pay an estimate of taxes directly from their bank account free of charge. They could still pay by credit card, incurring a fee.

The agency reported that as of 9 a.m. Wednesday, it had accepted more than 14 million tax submissions.

“IRS teams worked hard throughout the night,” acting IRS commissioner David Katter said in a statement. “We are back up and running. The overnight performance means that the IRS is current with all of the tax submissions, and no backlog remains.”

While it was out of service, a note on the IRS site informed visitors it was down due to planned maintenance and would come back up again on Dec. 31, 9999.

Which raises the question, just how staggering would the interest penalties be on taxes unpaid for 7,981 years?

The warning was fertile ground for late-night comics including Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah, who applied their Tax Day math to the evening routines.

The agency long has been dogged by an aging computer system and budget cuts which have made it difficult to keep the antiquated machines and code running.

The underlying programs the IRS still uses is called MasterFile and dates to the early

1960s, about the time the movie Hidden Figures is set. Imagine big mainframe computers that require their own rooms and were originally configured to use punch cards.

Some of the core programming languages used in its processing systems date to the

1950s and 1960s, Mulholland said.

In testimony before Con- gress in October, Jeffrey Tribiano, the IRS deputy commissioner for operations support, said approximately 64% of IRS hardware was aged and 32% of supporting software is two or more releases behind the industry standard with 15% more than four releases behind.

“We are concerned that the potential for a catastrophic system failure is increasing as our infrastructure continues to age,” he said.

While it was out of service, a note on the IRS website informed visitors it was down due to planned maintenance and would come back up again on Dec. 31, 9999.