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IRS 'Direct Pay' Option Not Working on Tax Day (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online payments on IRS.gov are partially down. But the government still expects its money. A page on the IRS website that allows taxpayers to make a payment is not working for many as of Tuesday morning. Clicking on "Make a payment" on the payments page redirects the user to a page titled "unplannedOutagePage. Note that your tax payment is due although IRS Direct Pay may not be available," the page notes. UPDATE 04/17/18: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Associated Press that online tax filers will get an extension due to today's website outage.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
or else...
fine (issue penalties) to people for paying late!
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check. The YouTube video for how to address and stamp an envelope will be the first in 2018 with a billion views.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check.
I don't think you understand what cursive writing is. Or if you do, can you tell us what you think it has to do with writing a check?
There is this service, controlled by the government, that delivers letters. Letters from anywhere in the USA to anywhere else in the USA. It even delivers letters to and from other countries.
Amazingly, as long as your tax payment is postmarked on or before tax day, the IRS considers it on time.
So get out your check book (assuming you remember what this is and have one), write a check and mail it.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Come one, someone has to post it!
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check.
I don't think you understand what cursive writing is. Or if you do, can you tell us what you think it has to do with writing a check?
You use it to sign your name. I guess you could always just "make your mark" with an X.
Found the millennial who's never written a check.
Outside of a signature, checks are only reason most people use cursive.
Isn't it obvious?
Government websites like this usually have planned maintenance windows right in the middle of whenever you need to use them. They also tend to make the login process more arduous if you haven't logged in recently, which you always deal with because you haven't actually needed to use them since the last quarter or year's tax date.
Oh, and if you have to do password recovery because of this? Good luck, you may have just missed your opportunity for on-time payment.
At least you can just "mail a check" to the IRS. In California, you actually have to use the web-based system to pay state taxes a lot of the time.
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check.
I don't think you understand what cursive writing is. Or if you do, can you tell us what you think it has to do with writing a check?
Ahhh ... I think this is the first time I literally "LOL"ed over an web post!
It can't be real! It's too perfect!
Dude, the USPS is real world. Write a check, put it in an envelope, and take it to your local post office. They'll even sell you the envelope and stamp if you need one.
Found the millennial who's never written a check.
Outside of a signature, checks are only reason most people use cursive.
Fou d the idiot. I've actually been writing checks for 40 years. In block hand writing, like every single bank had requested me to do so for the last 40 years.
You actually write checks in cursive instead of block? How precious your time must be, snowflake.
The illiterate were once allowed to sign with âoeXâ. IANAL, so Iâ(TM)m not sure if itâ(TM)s still valid to sign that way. Of course, the bank can still reject.
Dude, the USPS is real world. Write a check, put it in an envelope, and take it to your local post office. They'll even sell you the envelope and stamp if you need one.
So.....you mean like an email, but on paper? How do you use the loopy thing to physically attach the check to the envelope?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Found the millennial who's never written a check.
Outside of a signature, checks are only reason most people use cursive.
Google 'check writing' and you will see that all the examples use block, and not cursive. Apart from wikihow and their ripoffs.
Back when there were tellers who had to manually process checks, you would get cursed at for cutting a check in cursive.
Found the millennial who's never written a check.
Outside of a signature, checks are only reason most people use cursive.
Fou d the idiot. I've actually been writing checks for 40 years. In block hand writing, like every single bank had requested me to do so for the last 40 years.
You actually write checks in cursive instead of block? How precious your time must be, snowflake.
You should have spent a few minutes over those 40 years learning to type and/or spell.
And proofread, too.
It's typically used to fill out a check because it is hard to alter. It's also used for your signature, unless you are a millenial in which case your hand would cramp up writing that many letters. ;p
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Payments post marked today still count as being paid on time.
What I don't get is: Why are so many people so lazy about getting their taxes done? All the necessary paperwork should be in a person's hands by mid-February, that gives people two full months to get off their butts and get it done. If they wait till the last minute out of laziness, well, technical difficulties forcing them to go outside their comfort zone and actually mail a check is the price they may just have to pay.
It's quite common for web systems that work just fine under moderate load 364 days out of the year to fail under extreme loads that one day of the year when millions instead of thousands of people try to access it at the same time. Once upon a time it was called the slashdot effect.
A signature is you writing your name. This can be done with any form of writing. There is no legal requirement for cursive. A signature isn't really for identifying the signer, but rather to signify agreement.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Other than my signature, I have never used cursive to write a check. I haven't used cursive for anything at all since I got out of public school and was no longer required to use it.
I hand write so seldom that it's a miracle my hand printed writing is the slightest bit legible. My signature at best is consistent and unique, I would not call it legible.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
No, they live in the real world. If you ask any accountant, they say to never pay on the due date - you always pay a few days ahead because you know what? Crap happens. Systems go down, and if they're going to go down, as someone who works in the IT field, you know it WILL go down when you need it most.
So every accounts payable always gets paid a few days before the due date - that way if the system goes down on the due date, no big deal, the payment has already gone through. If the system is down when you make the payment, you have a few days to send payment through an alternate means.
Plus, it's not like you are forced to pay on only one day - you can pay early.
Paying early also accounts for delays in processing - just because you paid it, doesn't mean they received it, so it helps account for that delay, even in electronic transfers.
Your either forgetting or are unaware that many people these days that have a checking account don't actually have a checkbook to write checks. I haven't had one in over 10 years, nearing 15!
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
This year, I couldn't resist sending all tax money on Friday, April 13. That's four days early, which is highly unlikely to cause a problem for a taxpayer.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
because i don't want to pay the fucking slavers till the last day possible!
A group of thugs comes to you and says, "Your money, or your life."
You think, "Surely government will protect me from these gangsters!"
Come to find out, the gangsters AREA the government, and it's tax day.
Outside of a signature, checks are only reason most people use cursive.
Your comment implies that if you take away the signature, there will still be cursive on a check. But outside of the signature, checks do not require cursive.
I suppose there is nothing stopping you from writing the entire check in cursive, but since the topic is about learning cursive to fill out a check, there is no need to go beyond the minimum of just the signature.
Note that your tax payment is due although IRS Direct Pay may not be available,"
Sorry, what? If their payment infrastructure is down, then any lack of payment is the IRS' fault until they have it back up and have provided an extension for the number of days there was an outage during the expected times that a payment could be made....
The government will have no defensible basis to claim that anybody failed to pay, when the payment was due during days when IRS' ability to accept the payments was out of operation.
Do you also use crayon?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"People who don't pay taxes to the Fuhrer should be fined and jailed; teach them some civic responsibility towards the Reich."
Common sense is what you do instead of government.
You may be overestimating how many people live in the US or how many of them are millennials.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This misses the whole point that this system failed on the due date for a mandatory payment. It also misses the fact that a lot of people don't bother with having printed checks any longer. It even further misses the point that not everyone can just bail from work and run to the post office to get that postmark and still have a job. While we crack wise about cursive, they've been raised paperless by the same schlubbs that are giving them shit for being raised paperless.
You may use it to sign your name, but I don't to sign mine.
I heard this argument about teaching cursive (how will children learn to sign things), and thought it was so stupid I changed my signature to be all caps and printing.
I have not had a single issue with it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I looked through the IRS's site a few days ago. If you don't file the paper return you send through the mail, you have to use some online third-party service to file. Some of these(the urls) even look extremely shady.
There is no apparent way to file your taxes directly through the IRS website. WHY!?! I don't understand why the government agency in charge of collecting taxes does not have their own online service for collecting taxes.
Captcha: cannibal
ok...
You use it to sign your name.
No, you use it to write text using traditional implements such as quills, dip pens or fountain pens. Quite coincidentally, yes, some people are in the habit of writing their name in regular cursive when asked for a signature.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is why cursive is useless.
All but the best cursive is almost opaque to other (the one that didn't write it) people, the worst pritning is very legible.
Cursive is a very minimal speed inprovement (about 30%).
Schools should drop cursive, and maybe teach shorthand.
Shorthand is also illegible to the non writer, but it is very fast, and is not a useless skill.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I was making a cheap lighthearted millennial joke, don't read too much into it. Of course you can fill out a check without cursive - but back when schools taught such things, they taught us to fill checks out in cursive because it was harder to alter. The intent of my post was a sarcastic response to the parent, who seemed to think that the alternative ways to pay the IRS were onerous enough to warrant extending the deadline. Anyone born prior to 1990 would probably just whip out their checkbook and address an envelope without thinking too much of it. They might even have a stamp in a drawer somewhere.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Your either forgetting or are unaware that many people these days that have a checking account don't actually have a checkbook to write checks. I haven't had one in over 10 years, nearing 15!
So... 14 years?
So go to the bank and have them print you some temporary checks. There might be a fee, but it beats IRS penalties.
Then next time, learn to adult and get some checks, stamps, and envelopes. Not a lot of pity here or from the IRS for someone who is so irresponsible that they aren't prepared for alternative ways to get through life when their precious technology fails.
Um, there are 83 million millennials. In theory, they should all be paying taxes. Even if only 2% of them waited until the last minute to file, we're in the millions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This misses the whole point that this system failed on the due date for a mandatory payment.
While I agree that is a hilarious example of a government IT fail, there are other ways to pay. If you waited until the last minute to file and your only consequence is that you need to run an extra errand I'd say you're still doing pretty well. You can always send it in the next day and suffer the practically non-existent penalty. Hell, my state tax is going in a day late because I forgot to have my wife sign it and she won't be home in time. If they come at me for the fine it will be $0.02.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm due a refund (as I have for ever so many years now). I must've missed the part that covers the IRS Direct Paying _me_.
Most Millenials were born before the internet was a thing, and have sent plenty of personal letters growing up. And learned cursive in 3rd grade like everyone else. You're thinking of Generation Z.
Which is a couple orders of magnitude less than "billions".
Most people have had 3 months in which this payment could have been completed. And if they're able to spend their day at the office doing taxes, they can probably also bail from that same work long enough to go to the post office.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Most Snake People were born before the internet was a thing, and have sent plenty of personal letters growing up. And learned cursive in 3rd grade like everyone else. You're thinking of The Zolom's Children.
I was just trying to trivialize the inconvenience - don't take the lighthearted yank at the millennials too seriously.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It costs more money to use the service (1.82%) than you get back in rewards points on your credit card. Anyone who uses this needs to give me financial power-of-attorney because I will manage it better... for a nominal service fee.
Do you also use crayon?
Nah, they took them away. His parents complained they were causing rainbow stains in his underwear.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
"Common Sense" doesn't usually have much to do with whether or not a solution will work in the real world, because even simple problems can have complex constraints. I am not sure offhand where the due date is set. If a delay requires a change to a law or federal regulation it may not be quite that simple.
It also looks like credit card payments are still working (albeit with transaction fees).
Real lawyers write in C++
Indeed it is. Which is why I say millions of millennials. The billion views? That's because they need to watch it several times, then return to the page dozens of times to reply to comments.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I dunno...if nothing else, it seems to be good training for better eye-hand coordination and exercise...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
More than you might think. They are well aware of the ways in which people try to game the system. If all it took to get the date postponed was to take down a website how long do you think it would be before some black hats started attacking every IRS webpage they could find?
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
Or you can just request a deferral. It's easy and you just have to drop it in the mail by today. Or not be lazy and wait until the last possible second. If you roll the dice on doing things last minute that is on you and isn't the fault of the IRS.
My bank once rejected my signature because it didn't use RSA-4096 with a passphrase. Seriously, if they don't care that your signature can be trivially forged why the hell would they care if it's in cursive or not? I sign everything with a straight line because it literally does not make a difference and you are deluding yourself if you believe otherwise.
But don't sign your checks "XX" because that's kind of girly.
#DeleteFacebook
Wow, someone has an entitled 50 year old oak tree that's slowly grown up their ass. The reason I don't have a checkbook is the fact that I threw the previous two away without ever writing one check. Yes, you can go to the bank and get a check if you find out the IRS website is down before 4pm. But, if you wait until the last minute to pay, and a lot of people do, you may very well be screwed when you get home from work, go to pay the IRS and find that their payment processor is down. Now, in the tax office, we never recommend that they wait until the last day to pay but, how many people are eager to pay the government money before they absolutely have to?
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Most people have had 3 months in which this payment could have been completed.
Spoken like someone who has never had to prioritize which bills get paid this month and which get floated till next (with the associated late fee).
No, the sensible thing to do is to drop a check in the mail. As long as it's postmarked by the due date, you're considered to be paying on time.
Why do people think that completing work prior to a deadline, when there is no incentive or bonus to doing so, is laziness? If it's done before the deadline, it counts the same as the one done two months ago.
And the price for those in charge of the systems experiencing "technical difficulties" is?
And there's no excuse for it, especially since the load on the 365th day in this case is entirely predictable, involves at least as many millions people as last year, and is on a critical (to the government) system that it expressly wants people to use instead of filing paper returns and paper payments.
April 15th falling on a Sunday means that returns can't be mailed and payments can't be postmarked, yet for some reason we merely delay the deadline until the next business day (in the District of Columbia no less) instead of spouting trite phrases like "that's the price they pay."
It is very much possible enemies of IRS, both foreign and domestic have a hand in this down time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you wait to the last minute, then you made the wrong choice. Like the man said, learn to adult.
And if you owe on tax day, learn to account and file an change of withholding. You don't pay the government on tax day, you pay throughout the year and tally up the balance on tax day. If you do it right, that should be near 0.
People without jobs who are living at home with mom doing the laundry and cooking and giving them spending money don't generally file taxes, so you are likely dramatically overestimating the number of millennials who should be "paying taxes".
Many post offices are open late on tax day so you can get them postmarked. Waiting until the last minute to make a payment is no excuse. Not having checks in case you cannot pay online is not an excuse.
This is just another wake-up call to the stupid, lazy, procrastinating millennials that will go unheeded.
The IRS service may be down but services that let you ay via credit card (like pay1040.com) are still functioning.
But yes, it's pretty bad for the fee-less IRS service to die today, they should publicly announce an extension to pay until the next full day the service is up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But don't sign your checks "XX" because that's kind of girly.
"XX" is fine, "XO" is the girly one.
Touche.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There is also no legal requirement for you to take your hat off indoors or offer to take your shoes off when entering someones home. I still expect people to do both though.
Basic economics, the longer the money is in your savings account, the more money you earn in interest. Also, after Christmas, it takes a few months to save up enough to pay the Obama white slavery tax (health care tax penalty,) thankfully that will be removed next year.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I was under the impression that if a single user watches a video twice that it only counts as one "view".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Actually, it's the Turner's one!
If you owe taxes, and deliberately fill your W4 to reduce witholdings, and spend all that money, then you deserve to be taken to the cleaners by IRS. I have no mercy for tax cheats.
Tax fight is with legislators, not with IRS.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you want to bitch, bitch about the fact that the greed of HR Block and related agencies have created a world where we have to waste money and time just to make these corporate monsters rich. For the vast majority of us, the IRS could prefill our returns, state out refund amounts, and deposit it to the same accounts we used last year. This would say the taxpayer huge amounts of headaches Those who owe could get a simple bill similar to our property taxes. Can you imagine the insanity if we had to figure out our property taxes every year?
Yet because HR Block wants the opportunity to con us out of our tax refund(on a $1000 refund, for instance, they can take $300m that is 30%), we have to suffer preparing our own taxes. Everyone who wants to prepare their own taxes should have that opportunity. For this of us who don't, the whores in congress who service the tax preparation industry need to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I mean, we're digging pretty deep into a joke now - but Googling around it sounds like they are "views" and not "unique views". They take some measures to fight fraud, but a single person watching a video multiple times ostensibly counts as multiple views.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No, they'll call it "take the envelope challenge!" and it will be delivered by a 20-something with the enthusiasm of a crack addict finding a 50 dollar bill and overdubbed with pulsing royalty-free music.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Right, right, of course. Chromosomes don't determine gender anymore. We "know" that now.
I'm sure, if asked, the IRS would want to tax allowances.
Wrong, you can get an automatic extension, but you still have to pay anything you owe by April 15 (or 17).
Not exactly true. There are penalties for not paying by that date but you don't actually have to do it. You also don't have to pay the complete amount either and you can set up a payment agreement with the IRS if you are having trouble paying. And you can pay the amount owed by phone, online, or by sending a check with the appropriately dated post mark. Not that hard.
In any case the point is that if you wait until the last possible day and things go sideways you really only have yourself to blame.
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check.
I don't think you understand what cursive writing is. Or if you do, can you tell us what you think it has to do with writing a check?
You use it to sign your name. I guess you could always just "make your mark" with an X.
Lots of people use a personal mark. I certainly wouldn't call my signature cursive. Ever since my father berated me about my penmanship of my name in grade school, I looked how he signed his name and have written First letter + long squiggle ever since. Collecting checks for pizza delivery when I was in college, I saw lots of weird signatures, squiggles, and signs, but none of the ones I checked on at work came back as bad. I remember one that was just a weird looping of ovals like from a spyrograph that they wrote in a quick, obviously well practiced motion. Such personal marks are usually quicker to sign and harder to counterfit.
While I really do have plenty of sympathy for the people fucked by this, we face two uncomfortable facts: 1) Today wasn't the only day to file. You had about two and a half months since you got your W2s, 1099s, etc. 2) You grew up in a world where computers/software are shitty and unreliable, where it seems every damn service has been down for some stupid reason at some point, and you had no reason to believe that today would be magically different. And today is the day to most suspect the IRS would have a problem, simply because so many people put it off to the last minute.
Seriously, if you had to guess which day the IRS would drop the ball, you damn well know you would have said today. Just like Santa Claus has the highest incident of sleigh problems on Dec 25, leprechauns get groped the most on Mar 17, fireworks mishaps most often happen in early July, etc. Is it your fault? No. Is it your problem? Yes.
BTW, I'm no better than you, but I did my taxes yesterday instead of today. Part of the reason I did it yesterday was: what if something goes wrong and takes time to deal with? (In my case, the anticipated goes-wrong involved finding the W2 I was given months ago and "filed" in a "safe place.")
I paid my taxes last year.
Basic economics, the longer the money is in your savings account, the more money you earn in interest.
LOL You must still think it is 1995. Have you seen the interest rates on savings accounts the last 15 years?
Female is XX, male is XY.
#DeleteFacebook
"I paid my taxes over a year ago"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnJcZ-5P8hE
I'm afraid that the "real world," the one without all the roses (the one that includes slavery, among other things)... just wouldn't be the same without the IRS.
"How to Wipe Your Ass" - 2034
"How to Wipe Properly" - 2035
They're understandably sensitive; there's not a lot there to yank on. ;)
learn to adult
Three most amusing words ever posted to Slashdot.
Do they have to wear a condom as they fuck your pale honkey ass?
Oh, I did my taxes over a month ago. My theory is simple: You have until a particular date. Your ability to receive on that last date should not affect me, but rather you. Therefore, for those paying by this means, a one-day extension (assuming it's back up by the next day) should be enacted. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Millions of millennials will need to learn cursive writing so that they can fill out a check. The YouTube video for how to address and stamp an envelope will be the first in 2018 with a billion views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... 315k views already.
Hahaha, the comments are precious.
The existence of this makes me feel better about using YouTube to figure out how to repair my appliances.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh yeah. Those comments rival some Amazon reviews.
The illiterate were once allowed to sign with âoeXâ.
Wow, that's a rather complicated string of symbols for someone illiterate.
Well in my country, we begin to learn writing cursive in pre-school : writing our names, filling over dots, then writing our names. In first grades we practice writing letters, and writing letters, and writing letters.
The result? I can't be arsed to write in block print. I find it harder. It's harder and not pretty.
Forms have sections that says "write this in all capital letters", which we can at least deal with. Other fields are free form so I put cursive in there.
I'm almost or technically a millenial (For me the millenials are those who played pokemon. By then I was in middle school. Pokemon are for eight-year-olds)
Anyway : I have easier time reading and writing cursive.