
Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps - quickthrower2
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-27/irs-website-hack-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-all-caps
======
paypalcust83
Fun fact: The IRS Economic Impact Payment (EIP) site for non-filers is run by
Intuit. [0]

You gotta love those who lobby against simplifying tax processes and harvest
data on behalf of the IRS. And, I'm absolutely convinced Intuit will treat
that sensitive data with the utmost respect and would never, ever resell a
list of people who haven't filed taxes in a couple of years in order to
discriminate against them in loan applications, leases, and purchases.

0\.
[https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/static/privacy_stateme...](https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/static/privacy_statement.html)

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danso
So this worked for me, but I hadn't tried since a couple weeks ago (maybe the
all-caps thing was fixed by yesterday?). What's funny is that the subsequent
step (verifying tax info) had a couple of other old-school slightly bad
practices:

\- Blocking copy-paste of my bank account information

\- Input value for income can't contain commas or a dollar sign

\- Obscuring input field of SSN as if it were a password (I suppose this might
not seem wrong to some folks, but technically SSN isn't a password and most
other sites I've used don't treat it like a password)

~~~
robomartin
An old college friend of mine from 30+ years ago used to write his SSN on
every college book he bought. He also used an engraver to etch his SSN into
every tool he owned. The SSN was't all that important back then. I can't say
when it became something of potential value.

Sadly he passes many years ago. His wife called me in desperation. She needed
to get rid of and donate a bunch of tools and hardware filling their garage.
However, _everything_ had his SSN on it, I mean, he had an amazing collection
of Snap-on tools with his SSN engraved on everything, down to the
screwdrivers.

She trust me implicitly. We took everything out of their garage and donated it
to our local high school's robotics club. The caveat was: The kids had to help
me grind off the SSN from every single tool they got. That was an interesting
week.

~~~
Spooky23
You wasted a week. :)

SSN for deceased people is published broadly in various forms.

~~~
robomartin
Well, I had to honor a widow’s request.

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nerdbaggy
Fun Fact: USPS prefers that the address is written in all caps.
[https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_033.htm](https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_033.htm)

So I bet there is some internal API that searches or something for an address
with all caps.

~~~
dpau
I tried to change my address today on
[https://moversguide.usps.com](https://moversguide.usps.com)

In the address form, there is a field for PO Box. It is labeled "PO Box". One
would assume you should type your PO Box number in this field, e.g. "1234".
That is incorrect. You must enter the entire string "PO Box 1234". In a field
that is already labeled "PO Box"

~~~
Spooky23
I think that field can be used for other box purposes. "PO Boxes" are
exclusively offered by the USPS, but there are private providers that provide
a "PMB" mailbox, which depending on the situation may just a number. I think
military post office may use that field as well.

It's been a long time since I've had to look at it, but there is a Postal
Addressing Standards document that covers all of the various use cases. It
actually gets pretty interesting when you need to get a letter delivered to a
customer mailbox at a UPS store in an area with rural mail delivery.

------
singlow
Been checking everyday without success. I haven't gotten a refund in several
years, so I knew from the FAQ they would not have direct deposit info, even
though they pulled the money I owed out using the same bank info.

Tried all uppercase for my street address and it worked.

------
27182818284
For what it is worth, errors are being hammered out. The first few times I
received "unspecified error" then tried it again one day and it worked like a
charm.

~~~
theferalrobot
Same, frankly given so little heads up I'm amazed things have gone as smoothly
as they have

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achairapart
This may be the reason why every accountant I know live and breathe in
perpetually CAPS LOCK ON mode.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/oP5AW](https://archive.md/oP5AW)

~~~
kull
Thank you! The current Internet is not usable, all those paywalls. I miss
2000s.

~~~
3xblah
Having trouble with the LA Times site? Try without Javascript

    
    
       curl https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-27/irs-website-hack-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-all-caps?_amp=true|sed -n 's/.*<title>/<title>/;/footersubscribe/d;/<h1/,/<\/h1>/p;/<title>/p;/<blockquote/p;/<p>/p' > 1.htm 
    
       firefox ./1.htm

------
qppo
What bothers me is that they provide a single line to enter your information
instead of the same form they have on your tax return.

For probably good reasons they won't tell you if your input information is
valid, if you intentionally put in a bad address it will tell you "payment
status unavailable."

It's annoying because I don't know if my issues are because of my tax status
or my input information. A form would help with that. Particularly because my
street has ambiguous naming and I don't know if it's what the street sign
says, what the USPS prefers, or what is written on my tax return.

------
ohyeahlaws
I tried a 100 times but then used the shortened version of north and drive (ie
N and Dr). And it worked. Shame on me for using the address spelled out on a
letter from the IRS.

------
Pxtl
I accept that I have a number of beliefs that are considered heretical to
other programmers. = Should be for testing equality, not assignment. Null
should equal null in SQL. Whitespace is a bad delimiter.

But my most heretical belief is that the _only_ thing that should be case-
sensitive is passwords. Any system that is case-sensitive by default will
eventually break your heart about it in the stupidest possible way.

~~~
MrLeap
I agree (with pedantic caveats not worth mentioning) with everything you've
listed, unless you're using the regex view of what whitespace is and think the
\t character is a bad delimiter, well then, that's where I draw the line.

------
thrill
I just tried this and, well, it worked for me (TM) - it had not worked
previously.

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bni
This is not so surprising for someone that has worked a lot with legacy
systems.

Deep down somewhere there is a LIKE 'EML STREET%'. Making it case insensitive
will kill the performance because the index cant be used.

~~~
talliedthoughts
Right, but the system could convert the value to all caps after you enter it,
no?

~~~
peterwwillis
The contractors who designed this would need more time and money to add that
feature. Probably 4 weeks, 100K.

~~~
netsharc
I was about to say.

It could almost be a 2-liner Javascript (gasp!), 1 to import jQuery (more
gasps!) and 1 to run all inputs through toUpperCase()...

The bill will be 95K, thanks!

~~~
capableweb
To be fair, the 95K (imaginary, I know, but let's just roll with that) is not
for paying you to write those four lines, but rather to pay you for your
investment in knowing that you only have to write those four lines.

Same as the restaurant bill is not equal+margin to what they spend on food,
it's also everything else like rent, salaries + margin.

~~~
mschuster91
Or rather, the 95K also includes the formal verification testing for the
boatload of downstream systems that get the data.

That is usually what makes cost in government projects explode as they are an
utterly wild mix-and-match of code and hardware that is from the earliest era
of mainframes 60 years ago to stuff that has been made in the last half year.
Alone testing for encoding issues can take weeks... because most testing has
to be done and verified manually.

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jupiter90000
I was trying almost every day including yesterday, did this and it worked. If
it is required to be all caps it'd be nice if the site said so... I guess
maybe they just finally loaded my data.

------
gexla
The payment status not available message was (still is? I don't need to check
it anymore) a general error message.

Also noticed the page is running Google Analytics. Might that be a privacy
issue?

------
teilo
The sovereign citizen types are going to make hay with this one.

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revx
I got mine by typing my address in all lowercase, so ymmv :)

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ncmncm
Also abbreviate address terms: RD, LN, ST, not Road, Lane, Street.

~~~
sp332
Yes but also try with periods after all abbreviations. Ave. St. Ln. Ct. Apt.
[https://twitter.com/eruditechick/status/1253703820430827521](https://twitter.com/eruditechick/status/1253703820430827521)

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mercora
could this be because it bypasses a cached response? does it work if one just
changes capitalization of any character? (i have no deal with the IRS so cant
test myself)

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ngcc_hk
COBOL like caps?

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah that was my initial reaction as well - seems like a clue that everything
gets devolved to a COBOL backend.

It really wouldn't surprise me.

