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IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline

69 points by cos2pi 8y ago

vinhboy 8y ago
Oddly coincidental because I just spent all last night reading about distributed computing for Uber's payment system. I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.
- sp332 8y ago
  From information on https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-overview https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-overv... it doesn't seem to have been contracted out.
- orvtech 8y ago
  It is not the same traffic pattern, Uber sees a regular stream of request keeping their caches warm, Yes they might see 2X or 3X spikes every now and them but in proportion these are smaller than the spikes that the IRS will see today.
- heinrichf 8y ago
  Where did you read about that ?
  - vinhboy 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295
tekromancr 8y ago
This is a bit of a disaster. Not surprising, though. Lots of US government electronic services have gone unmaintained under the Trump admin. The website for servicing defaulted student loans has also been completely broken for months: https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/ https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/
- gervase 8y ago
  US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for decades; I don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc). I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
  - ateesdalejr 8y ago
    What will be interesting to see is if Trump holds to his campaign promises and improves this type of infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if he is only referring to physical infrastructure and not software.
    - ropeadopepope 8y ago
      Collapsing bridges take priority over temporary website outages.
  - Retric 8y ago
    It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions. Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president. (I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
    - newbie912 8y ago
      Except neither the president nor his close friends pay any taxes, so how would they know anything is broken? /s
  - technologia 8y ago
    Putting aside the external politics, its hard for govt employees to take on these sort of tasks. The reason I say this is because of how promotions work for govies. Its much easier to get promoted if you deliver a new system than if you were just doing ops & maintenance on a system you didn't have a hand in building. Sure, there are going to be some that will do the work but its definitely an institutional priorities issue.
sp332 8y ago
Official status page, if anyone wants to keep an eye on it: https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-status/system-status-mef/modernized-efile-mef-operational-status https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-status/system-s...
maxxxxx 8y ago
How do you design a system that is barely used most of the year and then experiences one huge spike only one day? Do they have tons of capacity sitting around most of the year?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_jones 8y ago
  Well they could have a sophisticated auto-scaling system that only pays for capacity as needed. Or they could have some lone IT person turn on a bunch of servers, configure a load balancer, then cross their fingers, the morning of.
  - newbie912 8y ago
    Does it really need to auto scale for a well known and understood usage? If dominos can do it for the super bowl surely the irs can provision for annual fillings
    - billhendricksjr 8y ago
      Yeah, the first peak around Feb 1 is almost a mirror image of tax day. You could load up for first peak, ramp down for the trough, then load back up again for the “deadline” (not actually a deadline). But you’re taking about 100s of times more scale, not 10s.
- wizardforhire 8y ago
  I ask the same question when I look out at parking lots. Yet there they are; wasting resources, destroying habitats, soaking up heat, and suppressing carbon absorption.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    At least computing resources can be repurposed more easily. That can be done with parking lots (park-and-rides, carnivals, etc.) but the physical proximity makes that much harder.
pasbesoin 8y ago
With recent concern about malicious entities in the press, I'll pose this question: "On its own, or was it 'helped'?" Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed. The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems. “While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS. The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
0003 8y ago
Russians.
- allthenews 8y ago
  Trump.
jameskegel 8y ago
Do people affected by this get any consideration if filing today?
- sf_rob 8y ago
  Nope (AFAIK). Their best bet is either using a 3rd party filing service (which appear to be working) or getting it in the mail in time for a postmark today.
- tedunangst 8y ago
  “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
- Someone1234 8y ago
  From the article: > “If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
jes 8y ago
Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year? Having everyone trying to complete their taxes on the same day seems wildly inefficient and wasteful.
- yohann305 8y ago
  because people are people... Enough people will wait till the last day, no matter how much time you give them, enough to create a huge server spike
  - mtrpcic 8y ago
    The point is that the "last day" is x/365 instead of x/1 (in the case that your taxes must be filed by your birth day for the given year, for example). You're right that there will ALWAYS be people waiting until the last minute, what he's proposing is that there are different "last minutes" for different people throughout the year so it's not an absurd number at one time.
- ericcumbee 8y ago
  Good point, in Georgia at least, Motor Vehicle Registration renewals (a form of tax) is done by the birth month of the vehicle’s registered owner.
- throwaway9d0 8y ago
  We don’t do that because it doesn’t make sense. How would that even work? Use the 2017 tax year as an example. You obviously can’t compute 2017’s taxes until the year is over. So how do you stagger? Is my deadline in January? That’s not really fair to me if someone else has a deadline in May.
  - magduf 8y ago
    Well you wouldn't have the same tax year for everyone, because you'd have to give everyone the same amount of time to file to be fair. So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know). Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all. Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.
logfromblammo 8y ago
This is one of several reasons why I file on paper. I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate. This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  You never really explained why you file on paper. Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    I didn't switch. I never started. Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand. If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem. I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
  - fma 8y ago
    You need to postmark your forms by the due date, not have it in the hands of the IRS. If it takes a few days to get in the mail, a few days (weeks?) for it to be scanned and OCR...that's less days left to audit you. That is one of my understanding why someone may file by paper.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Oh, great. I'm trying to file today online, though I need to look for a free service and redo all the paperwork because I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee. And now this. Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off. This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended. But they aren't likely to do that.
- noahjk 8y ago
  If you’re unable to afford the filing fee, I’d assume you’re not submitting a very complicated form, so while taxes are due today, why should the deadline be extended? It’s not as if today was also the first day available for file. Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on the IRS’s part, right?
  - djohnston 8y ago
    the deadline should be extended because the valid time window for submitting has been shrunk due to the outage. they have altered the deal, so to speak.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      "Pray that we don't alter it further." -- Darth Vader
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    It isn't poor planning. I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing. I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate. I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good. I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income. I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it. But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.
tedunangst 8y ago
I feel like this is a nothingburger hyped up to induce panic. I filled out my return today, on the last day as always, clicked some buttons, and shat out a return into the ether. The IRS doesn't seem to want it, but HR Block has it and will give it to them eventually. My work here is done, it's time for happy hour.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
Paper and postmark. I’m done. Technology sometimes is not the best solution. Just saying.

69 points by cos2pi 8y ago

Oddly coincidental because I just spent all last night reading about distributed computing for Uber's payment system. I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.

sp332 8y ago
From information on https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-overview https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-overv... it doesn't seem to have been contracted out.
orvtech 8y ago
It is not the same traffic pattern, Uber sees a regular stream of request keeping their caches warm, Yes they might see 2X or 3X spikes every now and them but in proportion these are smaller than the spikes that the IRS will see today.
heinrichf 8y ago
Where did you read about that ?
- vinhboy 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295

tekromancr 8y ago

This is a bit of a disaster. Not surprising, though. Lots of US government electronic services have gone unmaintained under the Trump admin. The website for servicing defaulted student loans has also been completely broken for months: https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/ https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/

gervase 8y ago
US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for decades; I don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc). I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
- ateesdalejr 8y ago
  What will be interesting to see is if Trump holds to his campaign promises and improves this type of infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if he is only referring to physical infrastructure and not software.
  - ropeadopepope 8y ago
    Collapsing bridges take priority over temporary website outages.
- Retric 8y ago
  It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions. Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president. (I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
  - newbie912 8y ago
    Except neither the president nor his close friends pay any taxes, so how would they know anything is broken? /s
- technologia 8y ago
  Putting aside the external politics, its hard for govt employees to take on these sort of tasks. The reason I say this is because of how promotions work for govies. Its much easier to get promoted if you deliver a new system than if you were just doing ops & maintenance on a system you didn't have a hand in building. Sure, there are going to be some that will do the work but its definitely an institutional priorities issue.

sp332 8y ago

Official status page, if anyone wants to keep an eye on it: https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-status/system-status-mef/modernized-efile-mef-operational-status https://www.marketingexpress.irs.gov/systems-status/system-s...

maxxxxx 8y ago

How do you design a system that is barely used most of the year and then experiences one huge spike only one day? Do they have tons of capacity sitting around most of the year?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ben_jones 8y ago
Well they could have a sophisticated auto-scaling system that only pays for capacity as needed. Or they could have some lone IT person turn on a bunch of servers, configure a load balancer, then cross their fingers, the morning of.
- newbie912 8y ago
  Does it really need to auto scale for a well known and understood usage? If dominos can do it for the super bowl surely the irs can provision for annual fillings
  - billhendricksjr 8y ago
    Yeah, the first peak around Feb 1 is almost a mirror image of tax day. You could load up for first peak, ramp down for the trough, then load back up again for the “deadline” (not actually a deadline). But you’re taking about 100s of times more scale, not 10s.
wizardforhire 8y ago
I ask the same question when I look out at parking lots. Yet there they are; wasting resources, destroying habitats, soaking up heat, and suppressing carbon absorption.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  At least computing resources can be repurposed more easily. That can be done with parking lots (park-and-rides, carnivals, etc.) but the physical proximity makes that much harder.

pasbesoin 8y ago

With recent concern about malicious entities in the press, I'll pose this question: "On its own, or was it 'helped'?" Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed. The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems. “While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS. The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.

0003 8y ago

Russians.

allthenews 8y ago
Trump.

jameskegel 8y ago

Do people affected by this get any consideration if filing today?

sf_rob 8y ago
Nope (AFAIK). Their best bet is either using a 3rd party filing service (which appear to be working) or getting it in the mail in time for a postmark today.
tedunangst 8y ago
“Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
Someone1234 8y ago
From the article: > “If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”

jes 8y ago

Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year? Having everyone trying to complete their taxes on the same day seems wildly inefficient and wasteful.

yohann305 8y ago
because people are people... Enough people will wait till the last day, no matter how much time you give them, enough to create a huge server spike
- mtrpcic 8y ago
  The point is that the "last day" is x/365 instead of x/1 (in the case that your taxes must be filed by your birth day for the given year, for example). You're right that there will ALWAYS be people waiting until the last minute, what he's proposing is that there are different "last minutes" for different people throughout the year so it's not an absurd number at one time.
ericcumbee 8y ago
Good point, in Georgia at least, Motor Vehicle Registration renewals (a form of tax) is done by the birth month of the vehicle’s registered owner.
throwaway9d0 8y ago
We don’t do that because it doesn’t make sense. How would that even work? Use the 2017 tax year as an example. You obviously can’t compute 2017’s taxes until the year is over. So how do you stagger? Is my deadline in January? That’s not really fair to me if someone else has a deadline in May.
- magduf 8y ago
  Well you wouldn't have the same tax year for everyone, because you'd have to give everyone the same amount of time to file to be fair. So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know). Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all. Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.

logfromblammo 8y ago

This is one of several reasons why I file on paper. I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate. This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.

Someone1234 8y ago
You never really explained why you file on paper. Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I didn't switch. I never started. Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand. If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem. I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
- fma 8y ago
  You need to postmark your forms by the due date, not have it in the hands of the IRS. If it takes a few days to get in the mail, a few days (weeks?) for it to be scanned and OCR...that's less days left to audit you. That is one of my understanding why someone may file by paper.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Oh, great. I'm trying to file today online, though I need to look for a free service and redo all the paperwork because I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee. And now this. Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off. This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended. But they aren't likely to do that.

noahjk 8y ago
If you’re unable to afford the filing fee, I’d assume you’re not submitting a very complicated form, so while taxes are due today, why should the deadline be extended? It’s not as if today was also the first day available for file. Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on the IRS’s part, right?
- djohnston 8y ago
  the deadline should be extended because the valid time window for submitting has been shrunk due to the outage. they have altered the deal, so to speak.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    "Pray that we don't alter it further." -- Darth Vader
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  It isn't poor planning. I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing. I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate. I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good. I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income. I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it. But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.

tedunangst 8y ago

I feel like this is a nothingburger hyped up to induce panic. I filled out my return today, on the last day as always, clicked some buttons, and shat out a return into the ether. The IRS doesn't seem to want it, but HR Block has it and will give it to them eventually. My work here is done, it's time for happy hour.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

Paper and postmark. I’m done. Technology sometimes is not the best solution. Just saying.