The IRS’ website has recovered from the glitch that took parts of its e-file system down for most of Tuesday. But it’s only extending the 2018 tax filing deadline by one extra day — until midnight on Wednesday, April 18.
The IRS has fixed its glitch
But taxpayers only get one extra day to file.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Parts of the tax payment and refund system went down early Tuesday morning because of a glitch on the IRS’ servers. They remained down for most of the day — coming back up only barely before the original deadline of midnight Tuesday.
When the glitch was resolved Tuesday evening, the IRS put out a statement that “Individuals and businesses with a filing or payment due date of April 17 will now have until midnight on Wednesday, April 18. Taxpayers do not need to do anything to receive this extra time.”
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the Associated Press on Tuesday that once the system was back up, “We’ll make sure taxpayers have extensions once the system comes up to make sure they can use it and it in no way impacts people paying their taxes.” But the IRS’ statement doesn’t indicate whether that includes taxpayers affected by the glitch who don’t, or can’t, file by midnight Wednesday. If you can’t file Wednesday, the safest bet might be to file for an automatic six-month tax extension, which will give you until October 15.
Taxpayers who have questions are encouraged to check out the help section of the IRS’ website before calling the agency’s customer-service phone number — especially because the glitch and its aftermath might be causing more people than usual to call. If you need to call the IRS’ help number (800-829-1040 for individuals), make sure you have the required information ready so that you can be helped quickly once you reach the front of the queue.
The glitch was extra-confusing to would-be filers because the site’s error message that the e-file system is down for a “planned outage.” However, the error message also said that the site would be back up either in September 2016 or in December 9999 — meaning the error message indicating a “planned outage” was, itself, an error.
The tax deadline is now April 18 at midnight in a filer’s local time zone.
It’s not clear what exactly caused the IRS system outage. But the IRS ought to be prepared for a last-minute rush of web traffic. In past years, the IRS site has often been the most visited government website in the week before taxes were due. In 2017, according to weekly IRS data, 13.6 million people filed their taxes online from April 15 to April 21, and 18.2 million people visited IRS.gov during that time. (The 2017 deadline was April 18.)
In 2017, congressional Republicans promised to use tax reform to simplify the tax code, with House Speaker Paul Ryan and others advocating for taxes so simple they could be filed on a postcard. The tax reform they actually passed in December 2017 did not live up to that standard (even though they are pretending it does).
Meanwhile, the system outage may have caused some Americans to use TurboTax rather than filing their taxes themselves — especially because TurboTax allows some taxpayers to file their federal returns for free — thus driving more business to a company that has also lobbied to keep the tax code complicated.
