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Turbo Tax Melts Down on Tax Day
Raven17 writes "Turbo Tax by Intuit completely melted down under the load from last minute filers. Some people have been having problems as long as 24 hours already. I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office."
line backs up at post office, line backs up with turbotax. Do they have some kinda guarantee about "if you file by x, even if our systems are down, you get credit?" I doubt it, they must've anticipated this very scenario!
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I think you meant 'DOS attack', but it was more like a self-slashdotting.
As for people... Combine laziness and hatred and you end up with a gajillion people that will wait until the last possible second to deal with it. It shouldn't be a real big surprise.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. If you're going to get into the online tax-prep business, you'd better have a stout server. This kind of failure can kill a business.
Or a stout series of servers, God knows you shouldn't be relying on a single box to handle that information with that liability.
Our W-2 (report of what we made - required when filing the return) doesn't arrive until Jan. 31st or a little after. The earliest most of us can do our taxes is early in February. And if you're like me and your former company filed an amended W-2, you get to wait a bit longer or file an amended return.
But yeah, that's still 2 and a half months.
"(at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)"
Because someone has to say it:
Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad. The government collected too much in taxes (well, more than they are required to by law). This money was denied to you throughout the year. Money which could have been earning interest, used for investments, hell, eating out a few more nights a month.
You get your refund back interest-free from the gov. It's really no different than if you left a $20 in your coat pocket during the winter only to find it the next year. Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year. I think that's too bad.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I think a better word is "went".
Ahhh, but the key here is the 'tedious journey' part, which is not conveyed at all if he simply said "I went to the post office."
This guy's the limit!
I used Turbo Tax for the last time this year. This was my second year and in retrospect it is just not worth it. Over $60 for the software, then it's I think $30 dollars to e-file, which I didn't do (certified mail). The total cost of software plus all the hours of my personal time to me it just isn't worth it. I am going to pay to have someone do it for me next year.
I think it was probably a bigger black eye for H&R block last year (or was it the year before) when they mailed out a bunch of TaxCut CDs to past customers and put their SSN on the address label.
I'm using my poor memory here but there are something like 180 million filers, 60% of which use Tax software or professional help (almost all the professionals use Tax software)
.60 * .75 * .20 = 16.2 million on the last day. Let's say most, 75%, wait until the last half of the day, that's 8.1 million in the last 12 hours. That's 187 per second.
TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 *
On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.
I do peak load extimation for Unix servers for a living. Somebody at TurboTax screwed up big time, real big time. They should have doubled the number of servers they thought they might have needed. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns, then process them batchwise as fast as they could.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Nope, they just worked it out with the IRS so that people could file late.
I know people just assume that the IRS would be unreasonable, but Tax software takes so much of the load and expense off the IRS that they will do anything cost free to get people to use eFiling. Intuit might give people a refund off of the cost of eFiling if they paid extra. (in the form of a coupon for next year)
You could try to sue, but Intuit and the IRS are being so reasonable that I don't think you could win.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Lets hope not. As any Sourceforge project manager knows, at any given moment at least one Sourceforge service is down or otherwise broken. This is especially true of the CVS servers and/or the file release servers whenever you have scheduled a release.
"He had no home telephone because it cost money."
"he won't have spent any of the money he saved on anything to give himself any happiness."
Yes, because you haven't experienced true joy until you get interrupted during dinner by telemarketing calls.
That's all true, but I'd still rather get a refund every year than owe. The amount of interest that I would earn by having that money in my pocket throughout the year is not significant. In reality, it is non-existent, because (and here I'm just being honest with myself) I'd only end up pissing it away on small luxuries. The amount of extra money in my pocket each paycheck would only be enough to make me dine out more, upgrade my cable package, or buy a new ipod or something.
And then when my tax bill came at last, it would feel like a hardship.
This is because each time I get paid, I pay my mortgage and bills, transfer a fixed amount into my various savings and investment accounts, and consider whatever is left to be mine to play with.
By getting a refund at tax time, I may have missed out on the interest, but the "found" money is large enough that I won't be inclined to waste it -- I'll make a major purchase, pay off a loan, or -- now that the amount is big enough to mean something to me -- put it into an interest-bearing account or investment.
Plus, the fact that I'm getting a refund is motivation to file in February, and avoid this whole April 15th mess.
So yeah, giving the government an interest-free loan is mathematically foolish -- but when you take psychology into account it can be better than owing them.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Good job living paycheck to paycheck, paying too much interest, and not saving for you or your kids' futures.
The load this year should have been roughly the same as last year, right? I doubt it was a big-time screwup on the order of "we have half the servers we needed", unless Turbotax doubled their user base in a year, which sounds unlikely.
Actually, they're getting paid from EVERYONE'S taxes to open his letter, whereas he alone has to bear the filing fee. It's clearly in his best interests to make them open the letter.
Yeah like that would work.
Your above average American has issues budgeting their finances for the month. Your average American would be completely hosed. The deductions are simply a forced budgeting system to ensure the IRS gets paid at least most of what they're due.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That's all well and good, but why did you make the online users click through 10 pages to resubmit? The resubmission should happen automatically or at worst be just another click.
why in the hell is the tax code so complicated we need computer programs to sort it out?
the real problem is the tax system and the fact that Congress does nothing to simplify it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow! That was stupid. I hadn't even heard of that. I think I'd take that over the rootkit though. There are still plenty of companies foolishly (illegally?) using ssn's as usernames and for other things they shouldn't be.
Posting anonymously since we're in the same business, though on a different level.
I think they're talking about *returns* per second. Not transactions per second..... 40 returns per second means 144,000 per hour. I'm sure it didn't sustain for the whole day, but based on what we see, you can expect that kind of load for quite a few hours straight. We were doing 60-100 TPS with somewhere around 10-20K returns per hour, and that was with heavy contention.
Personally, I laugh at them and hope that we get some customers because of this, but I can also sympathize. We were having a few problems at the end of this year as well, as was several other of our competitors. It can get pretty rough. I mean, how do you realistically scale for a system that has everything happen in a small time frame without breaking the bank? Keep in mind that your development cycle pretty much *has* to be yearly, and everything has to be ready exactly on time, or your company goes down the tubes.
You can do all sorts of load testing, I know we do, but we still failed to account for every single variable at the end of season. Load is high, and data distribution is constantly changing. We did great last year and for most of this year, we had anticipated all the right problems, and put out any of the other fires that come up fairly quickly. Just got burned with the last couple weeks' load. (the "normal" load curve changed on us this year, there was a shift to a lot more returns later on than in previous years)
Add to that the normal budgetary constraints and development tie ups and yeah, you run into this sort of thing. You can't get the apps fixed, but you can't get enough money in the budget for the necessary hardware and software. So then what do you do?
So we got burned too, but got everything fixed enough in time. We learned that since last year was good, we had relaxed too much on the performance tuning, but now that's taking a higher priority than some of the stuff marketing wants to add. We'll be a hell of a lot better prepared for next year and I'll bet these guys will be too.
A transaction is different that a tax return. A return may contain hundreds of different pieces if information, and then connect to the IRS servers to actually submit the return.
In other words, apples and oranges.
If you are talking about database transactions, performance depends on what the transaction IS. It's one thing to process 1500 TPS where your transaction consists of updating a single column in one row, completely another if it updates dozens of tables with triggers and stored procedures.
I personally would prefer that the government be the recipient of my W2 and let THEM do my taxes. They know how much they think I owe, and they're going to fuck me if I get it wrong... why not eliminate me from the process?
Do you have anything to back that claim up? I thought money had to be backed to be of any value. The government can't just start printing notes without backing it up (with gold or something else like property, land...) to be valued on the international market. And who decides what the dollar is valued today/tomorrow. I thought the market decided that, depending on how much companies and the people in the companies are worth.
It's a complicated issue, but I wouldn't just say that it was to take money out of circulation, because then as your dollar value drops (or rises), so do products in the store (given the price stays the same) so the companies would get the same relative value no matter what the dollar stands and there would never be any inflation anyway.
Remember, if what you say is true, and everybody pays their taxes equally, then the 'artificial' value is relative to everybody (also products and companies), and it doesn't matter whether that would be $100/$100 or $1/$1 then.
What I understand is that taxes pay for our roads and wars and government, if the government doesn't have enough money, they go lend some (as they have a huge debt now), they can't just print out some money and say: hey, we paid off all our debts.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It's called war tax resistance [wikipedia.org] and it's an age-old anti-government tradition that has been surprisingly tolerated by the government in recent times."
I guarantee that if you are making any significant money at ALL....and you try to pull this, that the IRS will not be so tolerant of you.
Also, in general, I read an article that congress is really pressuring the IRS to start trying to close the 'tax gap'. Basically, I think they're gonna get meaner and go after more people in order to close the gap between what they think they should be bringing in.....and what they actually do bring in.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Shh, the rest of the world might hear you...
Well, probably because the IRS doesn't accept tax returns where the SSN field is blank.
Except in your example, the government can create chickens out of thin air and you can't. Your ideas are only true if the US has a chicken for each dollar it creates, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.