Today, April 17, is the deadline for US individuals to get their tax forms to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and if you waited until today to file online, you might be in trouble.
The IRS’s website is currently experiencing technical issues that is preventing some users from filing. The Direct Pay option, where taxpayers can choose to have any money they owe the IRS directly taken out of their bank account, is currently unavailable. Those with credit or debit cards can still use those to pay online, however. Taxes filed through third-party sites like TurboTax and H&R Block are also having issues processing, and parts of the IRS’s eFile system are also down, according to Business Insider.
Millions of Americans wait until the last moment to file, but the IRS’s acting commissioner, David Kautter, told reporters that it was working to get its systems back online, and anyone using a third-party site to file and couldn’t get through today won’t be punished. “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.”
Per the IRS’s website: “The penalty for filing late is normally 5 percent of the unpaid taxes for each month or part of a month that a tax return is late. That penalty starts accruing the day after the tax filing due date and will not exceed 25 percent of your unpaid taxes.”
Kautter added that the IRS plans to reboot its systems soon in an effort to resolve the issues. But if you still can’t get through and don’t feel like dealing with the headache of waiting for the system to come back online, there’s always the old-fashioned way: mail in your tax forms. As long as they’re in the mail and postmarked with today’s date, they’ll be accepted without any issue. The only problem then is that you’ll have to bust out the calculator and green accountant visor.
It seems right now, conversely, that the agency’s Twitter account is more concerned with taxpayers’ grammar than its own systems: