IRS resolves computer problems after outage

The IRS said it does not anticipate major tax refund disruption.

The IRS said it was trying to fix the problems but warned some of the systems were likely to remain down until Thursday.

On Wednesday, Matt Leas, an IRS spokesman, said a power or electrical issue caused the failures.

“Taxpayers should see little, if any, impact on their tax returns or refunds”, he added. In light of this, taxpayers were encouraged to send electronic returns to a third-party processor like TurboTax or another retail tax outlet. Despite the justifiable trepidation that people who have already filed their tax returns must be suffering from, IRS has assured that such people need not take any action.

“We have a lot of people who we’ve filed who want to know if they’ve been accepted or not, want to know if it’s going to be held up or not”. Moreover, 19.5 million of these filers were awaiting refunds. The systems collecting your tax forms aren’t running on cutting edge technology or hardware.

Apart from attributing the outage to an apparent hardware failure, the IRS offered no immediate response to questions seeking a more detailed explanation.

Apart from the recent outage, the nation’s tax agency has suffered numerous computer-related problems and issues in recent years.

Taxes are due this year on April 18.

The system failure occurred at an IRS center in West Virginia, according to the person with knowledge off the matter. Thanks to persistent budget cuts, the agency’s efforts to modernize its technologies have been held up, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a Senate panel in February 2015.

The management report also said the IRS did not meet U.S. Department of Homeland Security performance levels set to ensure that government computer systems “are maintained in an organized, secure and approved manner, including timely installing patches to resolve known security vulnerabilities”.

“We’re running applications we were running when John F. Kennedy was president”.