
IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline - cos2pi
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/irs-electronic-filing-system-breaks-down-hours-before-tax-deadline/2018/04/17/4c05ecae-4255-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html
======
sp332
Official status page, if anyone wants to keep an eye on it:
[https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-
status/system-s...](https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-
status/system-status-mef/modernized-efile-mef-operational-status)

------
tedunangst
I feel like this is a nothingburger hyped up to induce panic. I filled out my
return today, on the last day as always, clicked some buttons, and shat out a
return into the ether. The IRS doesn't seem to want it, but HR Block has it
and will give it to them eventually. My work here is done, it's time for happy
hour.

------
pasbesoin
With recent concern about malicious entities in the press, I'll pose this
question: "On its own, or was it 'helped'?"

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._

------
maxxxxx
How do you design a system that is barely used most of the year and then
experiences one huge spike only one day? Do they have tons of capacity sitting
around most of the year?

~~~
wizardforhire
I ask the same question when I look out at parking lots. Yet there they are;
wasting resources, destroying habitats, soaking up heat, and suppressing
carbon absorption.

~~~
organsnyder
At least computing resources can be repurposed more easily. That can be done
with parking lots (park-and-rides, carnivals, etc.) but the physical proximity
makes that much harder.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Paper and postmark. I’m done. Technology sometimes is not the best solution.
Just saying.

------
logfromblammo
This is one of several reasons why I file on paper.

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.

~~~
Someone1234
You never really explained why you file on paper.

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.

~~~
logfromblammo
I didn't switch. I never started.

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.

------
vinhboy
Oddly coincidental because I just spent all last night reading about
distributed computing for Uber's payment system.

I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.

~~~
heinrichf
Where did you read about that ?

~~~
vinhboy
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295)

------
jameskegel
Do people affected by this get any consideration if filing today?

~~~
Someone1234
From the article:

> “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.”

------
DoreenMichele
Oh, great. I'm trying to file today online, though I need to look for a free
service and redo all the paperwork because I'm broke and can't afford the
filing fee. And now this.

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.

~~~
noahjk
If you’re unable to afford the filing fee, I’d assume you’re not submitting a
very complicated form, so while taxes are due today, why should the deadline
be extended? It’s not as if today was also the first day available for file.
Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on the IRS’s part, right?

~~~
DoreenMichele
It isn't poor planning.

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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Your profile has nothing in it. You appear to have no interest in using HN to
make those kinds of connections. So no surprise that you don't have that if it
isn't a goal of yours.

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?

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you for this reply.

 _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.

------
0003
Russians.

~~~
allthenews
Trump.

------
tekromancr
This is a bit of a disaster. Not surprising, though. Lots of US government
electronic services have gone unmaintained under the Trump admin. The website
for servicing defaulted student loans has also been completely broken for
months: [https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/](https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/)

~~~
gervase
US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for _decades_ ; I
don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in
power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc).

I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing,
fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.

~~~
Retric
It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions.
Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but
arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president.

(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.

~~~
newbie912
Except neither the president nor his close friends pay any taxes, so how would
they know anything is broken? /s

------
jes
Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year?
Having everyone trying to complete their taxes on the same day seems wildly
inefficient and wasteful.

~~~
clintonb
How do you determine when an entity—person or company—needs to file? If the
filing date is based on employer, what happens if I work for multiple
employers or change jobs? If the filing is date is based on the filing entity,
every employer now needs to keep track of my filing date. I got married. Do I
need a new filing date, or does my household now need two returns instead of
one?

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.

~~~
tedunangst
Anyone mailing you tax forms in January already has your birthday, so it
wouldn't be any more trouble for them to mail you that month.

~~~
clintonb
Problem extends beyond mailing forms. Everything linked to the tax year is now
broken in this world. FSAs, employer-provided insurance, even general
budgeting all have to change. Such changes will have an effect on the economy
at the $100M scale, if not $1B. Why? Because the government couldn’t rent more
server space? Buying a new data center would probably be cheaper than moving
away from a single tax day. The proposed treatment is far worse than the
disease.

