IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed.
The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems.
“While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
</tangent>
How big is a tax return? Some XML 10k/100k in size?
What do you need to do: save the file, maybe do some basic sanity checking and store the SSN of a person on a db.
It is complicated, but not impossible.
Obviously you can scale systems ahead of time if you know, but you still run into issues because you probably haven't scaled the entire system and don't know the likely bottlenecks since it's hard to generate that kind of traffic in a QA environment.
Think of the scale of facebook, and then realize most of their payloads are <1k json/protobuf. It's not the size of the payload, it's the delta in quantity.
Note: just about every online store must do the same type of thing around specific holidays.
[0] - https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...
Schedule your hardware upgrade cycle and lower priority workloads around the event so that you can get your hands on several times more hardware for a month or two.
I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate.
This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.
Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand.
If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem.
I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
I filed my state the old school way since they don't allow free electronic submissions. To my surprise they cashed the check in 2 days. Although, it's Oklahoma so they're more broke than I am :-)
There are free e-filing solutions, but not for my income range, and also last I checked (this might be a year or two out of date now) the various state-level agencies do not play well with the free e-filing.
And the paper forms are so easy! The hard part is sometimes figuring out whether you qualify for a particular thing or what a particular piece of income counts as, but that's more or less just as difficult even with software. Actually filling out the paperwork? Almost restful by comparison.
I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.
> “If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off.
This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended.
But they aren't likely to do that.
-- Darth Vader
I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate.
I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good.
I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income.
I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it.
But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.
I waited until just last night... so I was in a similar boat, but if for some reason I hadn't gotten them turned it, it would be on me - nobody else. You have to own your decisions, and take charge of your life - otherwise it'll just feel like a sequence of random unfortunate events... impossible to get out from under. Upon reflection, I certainly could have spent the 3 hours it took me to file my taxes back in February if I had set aside the time.
Also:
> I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee
This is for electronic filing, if you mailed them in (postmarked by today), it would cost you a postage stamp, unless you're referring to a tax software purchase (ie. HR Block, etc).
I don't have money to mail them either.
And I do everything in my power to take responsibility for my life. That's how I am getting well when it is not supposed to be possible. That gets me nothing but grief from other people. It isn't respected. It isn't supported. I'm literally called crazy for doing that.
It's seriously a no win situation here.
If a deadline is advertised and an assurance given that electronic filing will be available, it's reasonable for anyone to assume that they can file electronically at any time before the deadline. Clearly the IRS agrees as they've extended the deadline.
Everyone has their own reasons for conducting their affairs as they do, and you're welcome to your opinion, but it's not OK to finger-wag at someone when they're operating within the official timeframes and filing channels.
I think you might think Hacker News is something that it isn't. The leaderboard isn't something anyone really looks at and this is definitely not a good place to make or manage professional connections.
Show HN
Who's Hiring
Freelancer Seeking Freelancer
Patio11 and tptacek, both members of the leaderboard, were business partners for a time, though one lives in Japan and the other in Chicago.
Etc. As Nauseum.
But they all seem to be men.
The leaderboard, inasmuch as it correlates with any elite group, probably does so more because people who are already in that group are more likely to get onto the leaderboard for a variety of reasons, not because the leaderboard offers entry to that group (whether generally or for men specifically.)
I don't think I'm at all unique in being a man who has been in the leaderboard without ever having any professional connections through HN.
There is definitely a group with professional connections that overlaps with the HN community, including the leaderboard, and there is certainly no small amount of networking that is facilitated by HN contacts with similar interests, but, even before coming considering any potential gender dynamics issues, getting into the leaderboard just isn't a ticket into anything of substance.
It is a goal of mine. And when I do the same things the men do, it doesn't get the same results. When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common outcome is they hit on me.
One guy spent some weeks talking to me and pretending to be my friend before mentioning that he was married and needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was in the toilet and he was hoping I would be said shoulder to cry on. I gave him about 3 more days of my time to cry on my shoulder, at which point he resumed sleeping with his wife while talking at me like we were lovers, never mind that I told him up front I was not going to be the Other Woman. I cut him loose at that point. The more I think about how he intentionally withheld his marital status, the madder and more used and lied to I feel.
There's a whole lot more backstory here that I am unwilling to comment on here. Suffice it say, I have good reason to believe that if I were male, I would have professional connections here of meaningful value.
If you don't want to use HN to make such connections, cool. But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
I don't doubt at all that you get people feigning professional interest that turn things that way, and I do think that your gender and the fact that there are sexist, and more particularly sexually exploitive, men here plays a significant role in that.
You absolutely should not have to deal with this, and you have every reason to be upset about it. I suspect—and I want to be clear that I say this by way of explaining a pattern I've observed with this kind of targeted behavior eslewhere and how it tends to be targeted, but not at all to imply any blame on you—that the fact that you tend to be very open about circumstances of intense and urgent financial need and your hopes for professional connections on HN to alleviate that contributes to people who are inclined to they type of exploitation seeing you as a likely target.
I want to emphasize again that this is a problem with the people acting this way toward you, not with your writing.
> But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
While I think your expectations as to the general level of success at that here is too high, if I were to take as given the assumption that you are underperforming in that regard based on what would be expexted your leaderboard position and other indicia of prominence in the discussion community, and had to come up with an explanation, my first suspicion would be the fact that your professional focus seems to primarily be neither/technical nor financial nor in a hot application domain for technology, combined with the fact that you don't have a lot of money. Much of the networking at HN seems to center, as one might expect given it's connection to a tech heavy startup accelerator, to connecting people with certain professional focuses with each other and with people with money. (I don't think the attitude you've projected in the community about the issue since you got the impression that your failure to acheive what you expected was due to gender and personal animus helps, either, and there may be a bit of a vicious cycle there.)
But you could really be getting significantly disadvantaged in networking in HN because of your gender. I don't see evidence that would lead me to conclude that, true, but I think I've made the mistake of being insufficiently clear in my reaction against what has seemed to be your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone combined with your lack of success in that regard was sufficient evidence of exclusion on the basis of gender and that I've given the impression that I am dismissing the possibility that you've been disadvantaged in networking here based on gender. To the extent thst that is the case, it is my error, and I apologize.
your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone
I am clearly miscommunicating something because my point is not that my (former) position on the leaderboard alone should open doors. My point is that my (former) position on the leaderboard should stand as proxy for community esteem and since I appear to be the highest ranked woman here, why can I not achieve what I am trying to achieve similar to what men at the top of the leaderboard are achieving? The top three people on the leaderboard have very clearly established professional connections here. Why is the top ranked woman so unable to establish the same?
It is also intended in a nutshell to suggest that it looks to me like sexism is a very large factor, because if the seemingly highest ranked female member here can't get a toehold, surely no woman is getting much out of the forum professionally on par with what men are able to achieve if they so desire and set it as a goal.
I apologize if this seems argumentative. In the good news column, I did get my taxes filed for free last night and using different software that asked different questions, I am due a refund instead of owing money. However, that isn't money in hand at the moment, so I am still having a larger than usual crisis.
But I very much appreciate your comment. It is one of the meatiest comments genuinely addressing my issues in this forum that I have ever seen and I expect to find it useful.
But I also wanted to point out that I'm in the top 50 by karma and I also have made zero connections here.
In my case that's entirely my own fault.
But I can see how it would be worse if I was a woman.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-everyone-can-file-an-ex...
I used Tax Slayer to file an extension, even though my income is above $66k. The UI is clunky. You'll need to estimate your taxes, though.
But thanks. I will look at it.
So, tomorrow, for anyone who is wondering. That's actually meaningful to me. I managed to pull all my records together this morning, so progress.
I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know).
Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all.
Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.
It's mostly for businesses (which includes individual tax payers as sole proprietorships), and the things looked to for non-automatic approvals are things like what your actual cycle of business is like. (For individual tax payers, the only automatically allowed changes are, IIRC, change back to a calendar year as tax yesr and changes to align with a spouses tax year with certain conditions.)
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/small-business-taxes/s-...
Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.
Sounds quite complex. I'm surprised they permit it.
Because IRS doesn't write the law, that’s Congress's job, and the tax filing deadlines (and the other deadlines that are coordinated relative to them, like the deadline for filing and supplying to taxpayers W-2s, 1099s, etc.) are set in law.
As to why Congress doesn't do it, well, the fact that their are coordinated deadlines for multiple linked processes that different parties have to comply with would produce chaos if 1/12 of taxpayers had a tax deadline each month, and all the linked forms for those taxpayers, and the applicable tax years, had similarly staggered dates. OTOH, if you just gave some taxpayers longer after the availability of forms and end of the (single, consistent) tax year to file, there would be substantial fairness issues.
But be careful what you wish for. The IRS could decide you have to pay your taxes by midnight on your birthday (because it’s easy for you to remember) and then where would you be?
That’s right. Drunk and filing your taxes.