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.

Comments

"Your payment is due even though you can't pay us"

[ZorinLynx]

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!

Re:"Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[MightyYar]

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.

Re: "Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[kelemvor4]

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.

Re:"Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[atrex]

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.

Re:IRS Fault

[denbesten]

... an easy stance to take on /. . Arguing that in front of an auditor, well you have more kahunas than I.

Pages 74-75 of the instructions offer a half-dozen ways to pay. As long as at least one is available, I am pretty sure I can guess how that discussion would go.

Re: "Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:A great new source of government income

[93 Escort Wagon]

To be fair, April 15th is the cutoff date for filing return forms and any other appropriate forms along with any taxes owed (besides any you're filing proper forms to defer). It's not like April 15th is a surprise or that there is not adequate time.

I did our taxes a month ago, using the government's "Free Fillable Tax Forms" website. Also using that site, I scheduled our payment to be withdrawn from our bank account today. The return was accepted by the government.

Now as of right now (11:46am PST), the government hasn't pulled the money out of our account. I don't know if this is because of the outage or not - but in the past it's happened early in the day.

But, in any case, I did not wait until the last minute, and I used a 100% IRS-approved-and-managed system... yet this still may affect me. I would argue that I should not face any penalties if my pre-scheduled payment is delayed by a government server outage.

(to be fair, we have no idea whether or not the IRS will apply late penalties related to payment delays caused by this outage).

Re: "Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[butchersong]

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.

Re:"Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[fermion]

Drop by your bank on the way home, pick up a check, then put the check in an envelope and post it to the mail by midnight. This is once a year people, and not a surprise.

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.

Re: "Your payment is due even though you can't pay

[MightyYar]

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.