Technical difficulties hit IRS during tax season

A computer hardware failure knocked out tax return e-filing and other IRS system services for a second day Thursday.

IRS officials forecast that more than 80 percent of income tax returns will be filed electronically this year. Those companies will hold the returns until the IRS can accept them.

The IRS did not indicate that the receipt or processing of any taxpayer returns would be significantly affected by the outage for the long term: refunds were still expected to be on schedule.

“At this time, the IRS does not anticipate major refund disruptions”, the agency said. The agency noted that IRS.gov remains in operation, but many services on the site – including the “Where’s My Refund” feature – were down Wednesday night.

“The IRS doesn’t have its house in order at any level”, Chaffetz said in a statement released to the press.

He also said some IRS systems still use the COBOL programming language, which Computer World once described as “a programming dinosaur that was last hot in the 1980s”. The IRS reminds taxpayers to guard against all sorts of con games that arise during any filing season.

The IRS says the issue that started Wednesday was still causing problems Thursday.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said in an appearance on the Fox Business Network that the multiday outage might have been related to a hack of the IRS.

“Taxpayers should see little, if any, impact on their tax returns or refunds”, said Koskinen.

Taxes are due on April 18 this year.

“The IRS continues working to warn taxpayers about phone scams and other schemes”, Koskinen said. They are not expecting any major refund disruption because of this.

“We’re going to continue to file returns as normal and there shouldn’t be anything to worry about”, Marcussen said. In addition to requiring a user name and password, two-factor authentication requires another level of security to compete the sign-on process, such as entering a code sent to your email or smartphone. Good tax preparers e-file for free; if there is an additional charge to e-file your return, look for another preparer.