NEW YORK – The Internal Revenue Service’s online tax filing systems failed widely on Tax Day because of a hardware “glitch” in the part of the agency’s operating system that houses taxpayers’ personal tax records, according to the tax collection agency.
The malfunctioning of IRS’s “master file” was discovered around 4 a.m. Tuesday, the biggest tax-filing day of the year. The impact of the problem spread because several other IRS systems rely on data from the agency’s “master file” to function, the IRS said.
The IRS emphasized there was no reason to believe taxpayers’ private data had been breached. “There’s no data loss,” the agency said. “Taxpayers have nothing to be concerned about.”
The technology failures delayed millions of taxpayers as they tried to submit their returns online, forcing the agency to push back its original Tuesday deadline to the end of Wednesday.
For much of the day, access was blocked for filers who use online tax preparation software, such as TurboTax or tools from H&R Block, or pay their taxes directly to the IRS online. An erroneous page linked to the IRS’s online payment section described a “Planned Outage: April 17, 2018 – December 31, 9999.”
The IRS said Wednesday that its systems were “fully back up and running” and that it had accepted more than 14 million submissions, including tax returns, extension requests and other filings, since systems had come back online.
Former IRS commissioner John Koskinen said he was not aware of the agency having to extend the tax filing deadline nationally at any point in the past three decades because of software glitches on Tax Day. Mark Everson, another former IRS commissioner, also said he was unaware of any comparable past IRS failures on Tax Day.
Congress on Wednesday moved forward with a plan to bolster the IRS.
The House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill aimed at improving the IRS’s online systems, in part by allowing it to accept debit and credit card payments and requiring the IRS to create an online portal for filing 1099 tax returns. The measure passed by a 414-to-3 margin, but it now heads to the Senate, where its future is uncertain.
The vote was scheduled before the IRS experienced its technical difficulties Tuesday, but lawmakers are demanding answers from the IRS about its struggles.
