If you rely on the government to get things to run smoothly, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
On a day that you would want and expect the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) website to work, people attempting to file their taxes have experienced technical difficulties. Some parts of the site are down altogether.
“On my way over here this morning, I was told a number of systems are unavailable at the moment," acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter said during a Tuesday hearing on Capitol Hill. "We are working to resolve the issue, and taxpayers should continue to file as they normally would.”
However, people waiting until the last minute to file their 2017 tax returns can’t “file as they normally would” because of problems with the payment system.
According to Business Insider:
The IRS' website for the Direct Pay option, which allows filers to pay taxes directly from a checking account to the agency, says that the option is "currently unavailable.”
In addition to the Direct Pay option, parts of the Modernized eFile System system are also down. Kautter said filings from services such as H&R Block and TurboTax were not getting through to the IRS.
There is a silver lining though for those last minute tax fliers experiencing difficulties filing their returns, according to Kautter.
“Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having,” Kautter said.
For people that want to be in charge of the internet (net neutrality), the federal government is really bad at maintaining websites.
Back in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services oversaw the construction of the Obamacare website healthcare.gov only for the site to fail upon it’s release. Former president Barack Obama blamed high traffic for the site’s initial failure, but bad website coding was determined to be just as much of a problem for the site crashing.
Whenever the government gets their hands on something they either screw it up, make whatever it is more difficult for people to use or that something becomes such a burden that they have to create more regulations to fix their mistakes. Heck, sometimes it’s all three.
Way to go, federal government. You’re certainly living up to your reputation.