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."

Comments

Back up at the wire

[kannibal_klown]

My mom used TurboTax (I got stuck w/ TaxCut this year). Anyway, she said it came back up just a few minutes before midnight. People were flipping out.

Personally, I did mine back in February.

Re:Back up at the wire

[tg2k]

I filed in February too, with TaxCut, but I intentionally switched to it years ago when TurboTax pulled their malware installation BS (the rootkit, if you'll remember, from about 2001 or 2002). I haven't looked back much, TaxCut has been pretty comparable in my opinion.

Re:Back up at the wire

[TheRealFixer]

I did the same. I think it was back in 2002. Caused a huge black eye for Intuit because they took forever to acknowledge there was a problem.

I've been using TaxCut online since 2003, and it works great.

Re:Back up at the wire

[LordKronos]

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.

Re:Back up at the wire

[metlin]

I just find it way easier to pay an tax preparer to do it for me.

Easier and less of a headache. Besides, they tend to get you more savings than you would by yourself.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ryanov]

The taxpayers may be saving money in salaries, but $16.95 goddamn dollars to file? Forget it, let them open my letter.

If it's going to save the government money, why should I pay for it?

Re:Back up at the wire

[b0bby]

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.

Re:Back up at the wire

[stlthVector]

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.

Re:Back up at the wire

[hackstraw]

Personally, I did mine back in February.

Same here. My algorithm is "If government owes me money, file taxes ASAP, else if I owe government money, file taxes as close to April 15th as possible".

Re:Back up at the wire

[Asphalt]

Um, because they are getting paid YOUR TAX DOLLARS to open the letter?

Actually they aren't. Nobody working for the government gets paid with "YOUR TAX DOLLARS".

They get paid with Federal Reserve Notes well before you remit any of your earnings. And they will get paid whether you remit anything or not. Because there is a printing press that will give it to them regardless.

Your tax Reserve Notes go to the Federal Reserve to prevent devaluation of the currency. And since the "money" is created out of thin air, that's really the only reason you pay taxes.

The more dollars the general population has, the less a dollar is worth. So taxation serves to remove as many dollars out of circulation as possible, thus supporting the fiat currency.

When you pay FEDERAL taxes, you are not directly paying for any employees or programs ... as the money is simply printed and given to the Federal Government on demand, to distribute to whomever they want. So why, if money is printed on demand, does the Federal Reserve need YOUR money? They can create as much as they want. They don't need yours.

The reason is value. The more money YOU have, the less *value* your neighbor's money has and the government's money has.

Federal taxation doesn't pay for anything, it simply removes monetary supply from the hands of the populace. Less supply = more demand = curtailed inflation.

In short, your are not paying for anything with taxes. You are just supporting the perceived value of paper and ink that has no intrinsic value in and of itself.

Re:Back up at the wire

[profplump]

Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?! The doubled space after after a period rule was a hack to deal with the hard-to-read mono-spaced fonts on old computer and typewriters. Set type never used a double space after a period, before or after typewriters -- they used 1.5 spaces. And if your fonts are worth anything, they should approximate that 1.5 spaces with a full stop and a single space.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Mortanius]

NPR had a longer on-air piece about this, but unfortunately all I could dig up on their website was this brief (though the Listen link provides the whole story).

NPR : IRS Urges E-filing - But by Vendors Only, Please

Basically, Intuit (and presumably H&R Block and any other tax software producers) lobby long and hard to make sure the public can't e-file directly to the IRS, only by proxy. So your $16.95 is presumably going entirely to Intuit. Plus the $44.95 (or more, or less if you're lucky) you paid for the software. Plus the additional $29.95 if you have to file to two states.

It's a pretty nice gig.

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"There are still plenty of companies foolishly (illegally?) using ssn's as usernames and for other things they shouldn't be."

TELL me about it. I just went yesterday, to get water turned on in a new duplex I'm moving to temporariy. They would NOT talk to me, unless I had proof of my SS#. They would not take my word..I had to show documentation. My SS card is packed in storage with all my stuff post Katrina...but, fortunately, there was a SS Dept. office just recently opened in a mall closeby, and they gave me a printout which they stamped and the lady signed as a verification doc. This was stupid I thought..I could easily forge something like that if I wanted.

Anyway, neither the water nor the power company would entertain the idea of servicing me without a SS number...I was shocked!!! The last power co. I was with...wanted it if applying online, but, if you went in person and paid a deposit...they'd not need a SS#.

I swear, once I get settled and get some extra $$ back after buying a house..I'm getting a lawyer and working on getting something changed or passed in southern LA to FORBID them from even asking for a SS#.

I've had my identity stolen twice due to SS.....and I usually fight this tooth and nail when it comes up (like with insurance companies), and usually win...but, I'm on a tight time limit..and could not afford to miss billing hours right now...

Re:Back up at the wire

[crabpeople]

You should watch a doc called 'money, banking and the federal reserve'. For every real dollar in the system, the fed loans about 10k to the banks. The american dollar hasn't been backed by gold since nixon killed the gold standard in the 70s. You could say that the american dollar is kept afloat on the global stage because its a petro dollar, people use it to buy oil. This is why iraq (2000) and iran (recently) have switched to euros. Iraq got bitchslapped back into dealing in USD, but if somewhere like saudi arabia started dealing in euros there would be big problems for the us.

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"I have friends that will refuse to pay their federal taxes for religious/ethical reasons, on the basis that paying the government to make war or use coercive force is wrong, and against their religious/ethical convictions.

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.

Re:Back up at the wire

[gnuman99]

Saudis are already using Euros *and* USD for oil. Virtually all of Europe is using Euros only to get their oil. Russia is selling their gas to Europe in EUR as well.

I can't believe that Iran switched 100% to using EUR for oil. China is their biggest customer and they have tons of USD to spend. They probably have tons of EUR as well, but they probably have more USD at this point.

Re:Back up at the wire

[LordKronos]

Are you telling me you bought a piece of software AND GAVE THEM YOUR SSN? For what?

Well, probably because the IRS doesn't accept tax returns where the SSN field is blank.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ThosLives]

Except that's not at all how the government controls money supply: The Federal Reserve is the source/sink of dollars, not the IRS.

Money supply is controlled by the sale and purchase of bonds and the interest rate, not through taxes. This is why the Fed uses the interest rate to affect inflation. It's the effect on the amount of cash the Fed has to pay out to 'buy back' its bonds. Basically, if the Fed wants more cash in the market, it buys bonds more than it sells them; if it wants to curtail the money supply, it buys fewer bonds back than it sells. Note that the Fed target interest rate is based on the supply and demand for the notes. Also note that it's a target rate - the media and literature always calls it "the target federal funds rate". Because to get that rate, the Fed has to buy or sell its bonds. To increase the rate and "slow down" the economy, the Fed sells more bonds. The reason this increases the rate is because to sell more bonds, it has to make them more lucrative to the purchaser which means a higher interest rate. What happens then is the buyer gives dollars to the Fed in exchange for a bond. Note that a bond is not money, so money has effectively left the money supply.

When the Fed wants to reduce the interest rate, it starts selling fewer and fewer bonds (or buying bonds back). This reduces the supply of bonds so, for a given demand, the "price" the buyers are willing to pay (a lower interest rate) increases. Either way, this either puts dollars directly back into the economy via a buy-back, or indirectly because fewer people are buying the bonds so their cash stays in the system. Buying back takes bonds out of the free market and replaces them with dollars.

This mechanism, while not perfect, also helps adjust the money supply to a larger economy, because when real wealth is created in the economy, the creator of that wealth gets more dollars and more bonds are purchased. When those bonds are purchased back or redeemed for face value plus interest, there is an increase in available dollars. Inflation happens when the market guesses wrong at the interest rate, and more dollars are paid out during redemption than is representative of the current actual wealth. Similarly, if the economy contracts the money supply can also contract because eventually the interest rates on the bonds will fall and less additional money is required to redeem the notes; this will reduce the money supply relative to the amount of wealth. Stagflation happens when the nasty effect of a shrinking economy is paired with increasing inflation. (Yay for basic macroeconomic theory).

Another key thing to remember is that the Fed and money supply only control the tokens representing value in the US; they don't directly control wealth (and, as is important to note, value and wealth are not the same thing).

Re:Back up at the wire

[gnuman99]

This is the "haha" factor for you! Government *prints* money. As much as they want. And US is probably one of the worst countries in that regard. IT just hasn't cought up with them yet.

Money is viewed as a money supply. M1, M2 and M3. US doesn't even publish M3 money supply!!!

For more information about M1,M2 and M3 money supplies,
    http://economics.about.com/cs/money/a/money_supply .htm
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/M3SL.txt
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/M2SL.txt
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2

Regardless, money supply is increasing now faster than before. How? Gov't is printing money. It is preferable that the money supply is representative of some real value, but it is not. US has been running a huge trade deficit now for a number of years, yet the currency has not devalued as much as needed. The reason is that other countries like China and Japan are storing their USD and not buying stuff with it. So it should be clear that money just represents a perceived value, not a real value.

When gov't "borrows" money, it may mean A LOT of things. In the US, they just transfered the money from the retirement plan (whatever it is called - social security?) which is currently overpaid, and spend the money. Now that they'll need to dip into the retirement funds, well, there's nothing in that "account" so they'll just move it from elsewhere. To get money you can issue bonds, increase taxes or just print money. The problem with printing money is inflation (devaluation of the fiat (or paper only, like USD) currency). They more you print, the less a single unit is worth. So essentially inflation caused by money printing is exactly the same as a flat tax.. Right now the inflation in the US could be lowered by slowing down of the money printing. *But* US can't do that because they have to pay for the deficits. So instead of increasing taxes, they just print money. The result is exactly the same (less purchasing power for people), but when you increase taxes the politicians get blamed, but when they print money the "economy" gets blamed. Another problem with printing money is that countries that hold huge amount of USD will start to see their stockpile decrease in value. So they will start to spend. And this will drive inflation in the US.

The US economy may be nearing a tipping point where the USD will be devalued by as much as 50%. For example, USD lost 30% with respect to CND (Canadian $) in the last 2 or 3 years. It used to be 1.6 CND/USD, but now it is 1.12 CND/USD. If a US person got a CND savings account that got them NO return at all (0% interest rate) they would have gained 43% in 2-3 years. An investment of 100,000 USD to canadian currency would result in 160,000 CND. Today, 160,000 CND is worth about 143,000 USD. This is all because of devaluation of USD due to US trade deficit. And the US trade deficit is NOT yet accounted for because China and Japan hold over 1 trillion USD!! They spend that, and USD is devalued further.

The GP probably described the tax system as best as one possibly can. You are just a little ignorant that the value of fiat currencies is arbitrary.

PS. Gov't does actually need to *print* money. They just punch in a number and that's how much money is lend out. It only takes a fraction of a second to create another billion and thereby decrease the value of current money.

Re:Back up at the wire

[mutterc]

One needn't wait... one can spec on one's tax forms a date to direct-debit the amount owed, anytime up to 4/15.

I submitted mine

[Timesprout]

on my blackberry.

Perhaps

[niiler]

Sourceforge could help them with their server load next year :-)

Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[NeverVotedBush]

It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Mr. Underbridge]

It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

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.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[tehSpork]

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.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[powermacx]

Losers. I did my taxes last year. - Homer

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Maximum Prophet]

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)

TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 * .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.

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.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[LordKronos]

File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill?

File a few weeks before. When you file and when you pay can be different, so you aren't actually losing any interest. You can file in January but tell the IRS to deduct it from your bank account on the due date in April. Or you can do the same if you are paying by check (file in January, mail check in April).

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[sloveless]

You don't get penalized for filing a federal return late if you're getting a refund. A few years back, before I started filing electronically, I prepared my taxes, noticed I was getting a nice little refund, and promptly failed to put it in the damn mail. It was December before my lazy butt realized I hadn't received my check. (No, I'm not exaggerating.) So I mailed it. The IRS promptly issued my refund PLUS INTEREST! Granted, it was a crappy rate and I would have been better off putting that money in a savings account. Regardless, no penalties.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Agelmar]

There's a problem with your argument... you say that if one pays now, one can start saving up for next year now and wind up with the same amount of interest gain. The problem is that you assume the two are exclusive.

There's no reason I can't start saving up now *and still* keep the $10k in the bank until 4/17. Assuming you're making some non-zero return off of your money, it hurts you to give it away any sooner than you have to. No matter when you start saving for next years taxes (or whatever other confounding factors you care to throw in), you are going to lose two months' interest on $10k by filing in February rather than April, and although it's not going to make a huge difference, it's rather pointless to throw that money away.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[pla]

What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill?

Just for those who never thought about this, what you suggest works the other way, as well... As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

The IRS bases all its penalties on how much you owe. Don't owe anything? No penalties for filing a day late.



The government cares that it gets your money. It doesn't care so much if you don't get your money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns

Excellent, then my tax return could be stored along side my e-mail, calendar, documents, searches, and every website I've visited that uses Double-click or Google ad services ... in fact, can't Google just fill out my returns automatically now, with the info they have?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[hal2814]

"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.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Peter Mork]

As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

My gut reaction was that you still have to file on time. But, I stand corrected and I think you for the information.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[GoRK]

I didn't get the figures for my last 1099 until YESTERDAY. Kinda makes filing hard ya know.

No it doesn't. They missed the filing deadline; not you. What you are supposed to do here is timely file your 1040 without that information then re-file your 1040 when you get the additional information then either pay the difference with interest or claim the difference as a refund (in many cases this is with interest too). Optionally you can include estimated tax payments on your first 1040 filing if you want to avoid paying interest when you file again. Your final easy option is to file form 4868 for an extension along with your estimated payment. If you expect a refund the best thing is to file 1040 twice so you can go ahead and get your money back. If you expect to pay, the 4868 is much simpler.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[networkBoy]

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

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[proxy318]

Or a series of stouts. I know I'd be looking for a beer if my servers went down right before the deadline.

for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[otacon]

schlep : to drag or haul (an object); to make a tedious journey (from Yiddish shlepn; cf. German schleppen)

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[gEvil (beta)]

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."

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[elrous0]

...and pronounced like someone with pneumonia would pronounce "slept"

same as in real life

[192939495969798999]

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!

Re:same as in real life

[tha_mink]

In real life, and online, you can get much better results by filing a day earlier. Not true with Turbo Tax, they were melted on Monday too. The meltdown's been reported on the boards since Monday morning.

As a Hog Farmer

[ReidMaynard]

I shipped my 15% (30 hogs) early, to avoid problems just like this

Turbotax Issues

[mwilliamson]

I had royal problems when I got to the very last step on turbotax, right where you click to submit to the IRS. After a good 15 second wait, I got an error about being overloaded, and to try again later. What really sucked is that I couldn't start from that point again, but instead had to re-visit the last bunch of questions I had already answered. Being their Website is so format heavy, each screen took a good 10-15 seconds to draw on this 1.8 Ghz box, so the entire process was quite annoying. After 3 tries and some minor sheet-rock damage, I had to print the whole damn thing out and drive across town to our main post office. To add insult to injury, turbotax took my money before this last step was available. This sucks. I got ripped off, and I wont't get my tax refund in the usual week and 1/2 since I had to mail it. (at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Applekid]

"(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.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Zenaku]

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.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[vorpal22]

Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.

In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.

It's so unfair

[Aaron_Pike]

If only there were some way to file in March, or even February. But that could only happen if employers had a deadline to send out W-2 forms by like the end of January.

Re:Why Wait?

[Texodore]

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.

Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[cyberkahn]

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.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[CastrTroy]

Wow, that's expensive. I'm using uFile in Canada, and it's $16 to fill in your return, and submit it electronically. All inclusive.

Obligatory Simpson's Quote

[CastrTroy]

Would you look at those morons... I paid my taxes over a year ago!

Re:Netcraft confirms

[__aaanwh8370]

TurboTax.com does not host the online TurboTax application - that's the brochure-ware for turbotax. Those servers also do not host Intuit's electronic filing services (which are hosted indenpendently from turbo tax online as well).

The TurboTax web app is hosted @ www.turbotaxonline.com and still runs on Solaris (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.turb otaxonline.com)

For next year...

[Avatar8]

Will Intuit learn their lesson and strengthen their servers and network for next year's last minute rush? Given their track record of quality, I seriously doubt it.

Will the procrastinators learn their lesson and file at least a day early? Heck no. They even had two extra days this year. If paying the taxes is the issue, that's what an extension is for.

I am a horrible procrastinator myself, but I guess my greed overpowers that. My taxes were done, returned and spent in February. Woot! New PC!

I also learned a few years back that Turbo Tax is no better than most of the other products out there, free or otherwise. I've been using http://www.taxact.com/ for the past three years. I usually do the download, but I tried the web version for my mother-in-law's taxes. Very smooth, quick, painless and best of all, completely free. I did my mother-in-law's taxes Sunday, 4/15. That's the latest I've ever filed a return. Guess I'm getting sloppy like the unwashed masses.

Started well before tuesday...

[Temkin]

I filed monday morning. I'm still waiting for my confirmation. I'm going to have to call the IRS to find out if it was actually transmitted. You have to admit, it's a neat loophole. The government isn't alllowed to entrap you, so they get a corperation to do it for them, and reap the penalty rewards. Hey we gotta pay for GW's spending somehow, right?

I'm not going to be a guinea pig for their e-file fantasies/experments. If I pay a cent in penalties, the IRS will get paper from me for a decade.

Extended IRS deadline for East Coast Filers

[mumbaiyaa]

Procastinators rejoice!
The IRS website says:

R-2007-89, April 16, 2007 WASHINGTON -- Victims of the major storm affecting several Northeastern states on Monday, April 16 will have two additional days to file their tax returns beyond the April 17 tax deadline, the Internal Revenue Service announced today. Taxpayers directly impacted by the storm have until midnight April 19 to meet their tax filing obligations without incurring late filing and payment penalties.

Re:Melt down

[Maximum Prophet]

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.

2-day Extension

[flamingnight]

If you were affected by the storm that hit parts of the East Coast over the weekend, the IRS has granted a 2-day tax extension. Just write "April 16 Storm" on your return.

EULA

[Wisconsingod]

TurboTax online has a few key points in their EULA that will protect thiem from these fiascos.

to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, intuit and its suppliers are not liable for any indirect, special, incidental, exemplary or consequential damages or for damages relating to loss of business, telecommunication failures, loss, corruption, security or theft of data, viruses, spyware, loss of profits or investment, tax positions taken by you, inability to file your return, or the like, whether based in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, product liability or otherwise, even if intuit or its suppliers have been advised of the possibility of such damages and even if a remedy set forth herein is found to have failed of its essential purpose.

the software and services are provided "as-is" and, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, intuit, its affiliates, licensors, participating financial institutions, third-party content or service providers, retailers, distributors, dealers and suppliers (collectively, "suppliers") disclaim all guarantees and warranties, express or implied, regarding the software or services, including any warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, title, merchantability, and non-infringement. intuit does not warrant that software or services are secure, free from bugs, viruses, interruption, errors, or other program limitations or my personal favorite, don't buy the software until you print clause....

you may use the software without charge up to the point you decide to print or electronically file your tax return. printing or electronically filing your return reflects your satisfaction with software, at which time you will be required to pay or register for the product.

efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process) rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it in the mailbox on the way to work? What am I missing here?

Re:efiling a ripoff

[Lxy]

It's all about speed. How quickly do you want your refund?

efile + direct deposit means a refund in (usually) 72 hours or less. It's almost instant money.

mailed + direct deposit means a refund in 2-3 weeks. Very acceptable, and if you're cheap like me it's a great option.

mailed + mailed check means a refund in a month or two.

Mailing a check is apparently the biggest delay. So if you, for whatever reason, efiled and want a paper check, you're wasting your money.

Yuh Huh...

[Greyfox]

And here's how most companies do load estimation:

Peak Load Estimation Guy: You need 300 xeon class servers on optical fibre to handle the load!
Peak Load Estimation Guy's Manager to His Boss: Yeah we'll be fine with a 486 on DSL!

Later...

CEO to Public: There's no way we could have foreseen the huge spike in traffic that caused our servers to melt down.

You should be asking instead

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:You should be asking instead

[wayne1932]

quote---why do I have to go through turbo-tax and it's like, instead of straight to the government?=---unquote

This is my opinion exactly. I sent them my return and a check for $24. Why should I double (almost) my outlay so that I can be square with the gov't when I do it for the cost of a 39 cent stamp? When I can efile with the IRS without someone else raking off a few of my dollars in the process, I will use the service, until then the post office gets my trade.

Just my opinion and my two cents worth.

Simplified tax system

[soft_guy]

Since you want a simplified tax system, just send us all your money. You didn't need it anyway. Thanks a lot. Congress

Re:Simplified tax system

[ryanov]

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?

Re:Simplified tax system

[AJWM]

It's been done -- well, something like that, anyway. Decades ago I once had a (seasonal) job as a keypunch operator for Revenue Canada (Canada's IRS equivalent), encoding tax returns. I opened up one and it's full of papers, receipts and forms with a note on the front "I can't figure this out, you do it." Obviously that one got routed to special processing.

OTOH, you can be sure that "special processing" doesn't go out of their way to make sure you've taken every deduction you've got coming to you. If you're paying a mortgage (in the US, I don't recall the rules in Canada) it's almost certainly worthwhile itemizing the mortgage interest instead of taking the standard deduction. (This is not tax advice, IANAL or tax accountant, your mileage may vary, etc.)

Re:40 TPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:40 TPS?

[walt-sjc]

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.

Money is a convention

[DragonHawk]

You are just supporting the perceived value of paper and ink that has no intrinsic value in and of itself.

Every word you wrote is absolutely true. From an economic theory standpoint, it's really quite a critical concept. As a philosophical statement, that was really quite deep and insightful (seriously). However, from a strictly pragmatic point-of-view, that is absolutely worthless.

Money is an abstraction which exists for convenience. It saves us from having to carry chickens to the gas station. Rather than being carrying chickens around, we say, here's an abstraction which we'll all agree to deal in. It's a lot easier and less messy than carrying chickens around. The first step was using tokens to represent chickens. Rather than carrying the chicken, we carried a token that represented a chicken. But it quickly became obvious that, hey, all I really care about is the value represented by the token. I don't care about the chicken (maybe I prefer beef anyway). So let's all just agree to say the token represents an abstract concept of value. Saves the trouble of keeping all those chickens around.

It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency. When I pay for my gas or Internet in US dollars rather than chickens, I'm supporting the currency. When I get paid in US dollars, I'm supporting the currency. When I browse Slashdot and look at the ends, that translates into resources used, which are paid for in US dollars, which supports the currency.

If you prefer, substitute some other tangible good, such as "cows", "cheese", or even "gold" for "chickens". It's all the same concept.

Intuit's problem caused by a software bug

[Aku Head]

I spent several hours trying to transmit my returns to the Intuit servers. At first, I would try every half hour because I thought that the server was down and would be back up soon. Then, I went to the Intuit forums. (There's some teed-off people there!) It turns out that the servers were running, just not very well. So I got a glass of wine and made a game out of hitting the transmit button over and over again until it worked. This process is slower than it should be because there is a bug in the program that makes you save your return every time. (thus erasing the time stamp of when you actually finished your return)

Most of the time, the transmission failed instantly with the dialog box asking you to try again after 4 am. However, sometimes it would completely upload my returns, pause and then fail with some truly bizarre error text. Out of the more than a hundred attempts, this occured maybe five times. The error text was different every time. In these cases I was actually putting a load on their servers. Multiply this across the whole country and you can see how this bug greatly multiplied the load on their servers.

So, although the company is trying to blame the taxpayers for their problem by filing late, I think that Intuit's software is actually to blame for the increased load.

On another subject, why do we have to pay to upload our tax returns? If it saves the IRS money, shouldn't they pay us? Why can't we just use the software and upload directly to the IRS? If the IRS claims that they can't handle the traffic, don't they get the traffic anyway? Your $16.95 per return just pays Intuit to hold on to it for a few milliseconds before retransmitting it to the IRS.

Nothing inherently wrong with fiat currency

[ccmay]

So we all agree instead that a dollar represents an abstract concept of value.

It may be abstract in some sense, but it does have a very practical value: It makes tax collectors go away if you give some of it to them, without stealing your cows or chickens, or ejecting you from your home at gunpoint, or clapping you in prison. This is a great advancement in the history of civilization.

Fiat currency does not have to be inflationary, if the government has the discipline not to increase the money supply by a greater percentage than the national economy's increase in productivity. Theoretically, it can even undergo deflation, which you might remember being discussed in worried tones about seven or eight years ago at the height of the tech bubble.

Conversely, the buying power of commodity-backed money can fluctuate wildly. Spain had dreadful inflation after conquering the gold and silver mining regions of the Americas. In the late 1800s, the question of whether to use gold or silver for backing the currency was a matter of great dispute, because with the discovery of the Comstock Lode and other great silver deposits, farmers and other debtors clamored for a silver-backed currency in full knowledge that it would be inflationary.

Gold-backed currency would not be a good idea for a modern economy. If technology increases the efficiency of gold extraction, a gold note loses value and inflation results. If the mines play out, money becomes more valuable and the nation suffers deflation, even if there is no good reason for it in the economy as a whole.

So long as the government accepts its own greenbacks for payment of taxes owed, and prudently manages the money supply, there is no need for concern about "fiat" money. The best thing we can do to ensure this is the case is to demand transparency from the Federal Reserve, and closely scrutinize the qualifications and good judgment of those persons appointed to its governing board.

-ccm