The IRS notably managed to put new security measures in place in a collaborative effort with its 13 tax software partners to combat fraud past year. “By filing early, you cannot only get your refund more quickly, but you lock out your personal information so that the bag guys can’t get to it”, says Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
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Al Burgos of Burgos Income Tax says, “Our client base is not very happy, and as a tax professional, I’m not very happy”.
Debra Nash with Liberty Tax Service in Carthage says “The failure is the machine that actually accepts and processes and sends the acceptances back”. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn’t anticipate “major disruptions”.
Scams like these are most likely to work on the elderly, people with mental disabilities or people who have difficulty speaking English. The agency’s estimation is that close to 2 million people in IN should qualify for the program, but one can confirm if they qualify from the Department of Revenue’s website. In addition, the IRS does not demand consumers pay taxes without the opportunity for question or appeal, require a specific payment method, ask for card numbers over the phone or threaten law enforcement action.
There’s no word on when the system might be fixed, but we’re guessing whoever the IRS brings in will probably be feeling the pressure to solve the problem fast.
The IRS says it has resolved a computer system outage and is again accepting electronically filed tax returns.
The IRS said the problem is associated with a “hardware failure” that has shut down a number of tax processing systems. They can securely save all the information in their systems and press submit as soon as the IRS e-filing is back online. Those accounts don’t mean much if they don’t work.
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The tax agency offered no immediate response to Chaffetz, who previous year called for the impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas and preserve documents.
