Online tax processing at IRS back up after hardware failure
The tax processing tools taken offline due to a hardware failure at the IRS have all been restored.
The failure caused the agency to shut down several key taxpayer and tax practitioner tools, like e-file and Where’s My Refund, on Wednesday night.
Both services were intermittently working over Thursday and were fully restored by the evening.
“IRS teams worked throughout the night and around the clock on this system outage,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said. “We apologize for the inconvenience this caused, and we appreciate the support and patience from taxpayers as well as our partners in the tax community and state revenue departments.”
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Refunds should not be delayed, with the agency expecting that nine out of 10 taxpayers will receive their refunds within 21 days.
The outage marks an inauspicious start to the 2016 tax season after the agency had a rough 2015. Last year, 320,000 taxpayers had their information accessed and likely stolen via the IRS’ “Get Transcript” application, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, tax filing statuses and street addresses. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Senate Finance Committee in June the breach could mean as much as $50 million would be lost to fraudulent returns.
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