CLOUD
CLOUD
CLOUD
Good news, everyone! IRS extends tax filing deadline after system crash
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has graciously extended the ability for people to file their annual tax returns to April 18 after its systems managed to go offline a lot of April 17, the day by which taxpayers were required to file their paperwork.
The system crash, described by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as a “high-volume technical issue,” saw people trying to do the right thing in terms of paying taxes presented with this message: “This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
“This is the busiest tax day of the year, and the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers,” Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter said in a statement. “The IRS appreciates everyone’s patience during this period. The extra time will help taxpayers affected by this situation.”
The IRS outage also affected third-party services that rely on taxman’s system to be working, including TurboTax and H&R Block.
At the same time the IRS tax filing system was offline, Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter was testifying before a Congressional hearing, not only mentioning the outage, saying that “we are working to resolve this issue and taxpayers should continue to file their returns as they normally would,” but also attempting to deflect blame.
“Of the IRS hardware, 59 percent of it is obsolete,” Kutter said. “Thirty-two percent of its software is at least two updates behind.” Because this is 2018, Kutter also implied Russians are to blame, saying that “the IRS systems are subject to 2.5 million cyberattacks a day, 1 million of which are sophisticated attacks.”
In written testimony, Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said that “aged information technology hardware, when combined with the fact that components of the infrastructure and systems are interrelated and interdependent, make outages and failures unpredictable and introduce security risks to critical taxpayer data.”
Some of those systems are said to date back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, although as U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly pointed out, that may be a good thing: Chinese hackers “don’t know how to hack COBOL systems.”
Photo: soukup/Flickr
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
