IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline

Re:IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before mid... by clintonb on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @04:06PM (#16861819)

How do you determine when an entity—person or company—needs to file? If the filing date is based on employer, what happens if I work for multiple employers or change jobs? If the filing is date is based on the filing entity, every employer now needs to keep track of my filing date. I got married. Do I need a new filing date, or does my household now need two returns instead of one?

Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.

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Re:IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before mid... by tedunangst on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @04:16PM (#16861916)

Anyone mailing you tax forms in January already has your birthday, so it wouldn't be any more trouble for them to mail you that month.

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Re:IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before mid... by clintonb on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @07:12PM (#16863120)

Problem extends beyond mailing forms. Everything linked to the tax year is now broken in this world. FSAs, employer-provided insurance, even general budgeting all have to change. Such changes will have an effect on the economy at the $100M scale, if not $1B. Why? Because the government couldn’t rent more server space? Buying a new data center would probably be cheaper than moving away from a single tax day. The proposed treatment is far worse than the disease.

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