IRS Computer Problems Shut Down Tax Return E-file System (foxnews.com)

Mr.Intel writes: The IRS stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns Wednesday because of problems with some of its computer systems. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn't anticipate "major disruptions." A "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS.gov website remains available, but "where's my refund" and other services are not working. Some systems will be out of service at least until Thursday, the agency said. "The IRS is currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible," the IRS said.

Comments

Re:Since all money is fiat, why have taxes at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Money has no intrinsic value. The worth of money is in what people believe it can be exchanged for. If you flood a market with currency, it will not take long before even the text on the bills claiming that they are "legal tender for all debts, public and private" and the threat of governmental force against those who would refuse the currency are not enough to retain any value.

The USA has an economic advantage from the US dollar being an accepted international trade currency. Foreign currency speculation and international investors buffer the consequences of ill-conceived federal monetary policy. No amount of investors and currency speculators can restrain the abject idiocy of factorial devaluation that would result from a government just printing money until debts are paid off. Every government that has gone that way ended the process by abandoning their old currency and defining a new one not tied to the old agreements.

Tax Returns???

[acoustix]

Why do people give the government an interest free loan? Getting money back from the IRS is wasteful. Let your money work for you during the year (investments) and then pay the government if necessary.

Re:Isn't the R for redundancy?

[MachineShedFred]

I work on a team that writes billing and invoicing software for my company. I can tell you with first hand experience that accountants have no fucking clue how a computer works, other than what they can do in Excel. Because of this, they want to do EVERYTHING in Excel whether it's even remotely the right tool or not.

Example: someone wants to export the general ledger from the billing system to an Excel spreadsheet, and doesn't understand why a two million row data set might be a problem for Excel.

These issues are exactly why "Business Intelligence" tools exist - to provide Excel-ish functions, backed by a real database. But they don't want to hear that, because it means that Excel might actually have limits, and they would have to learn a new tool.

Getting closer to TFA, I'm sure that somewhere in the IRS they have honest-to-goodness network engineers who set this shit up, or at least contractors that they paid to do it. Hardware failures happen in any data center, and you try to mitigate with redundancy and automatic fail-over. But it's never perfect, there's always something that gets missed, or something that doesn't work exactly as expected.