They can still do this through their e-file providers until IRS continues accepting electronic tax returns from the said companies.
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Debra Nash with Liberty Tax Service in Carthage says “The failure is the machine that actually accepts and processes and sends the acceptances back”.
He also said some IRS systems still use the COBOL programming language, which Computer World once described as “a programming dinosaur that was last hot in the 1980s”.
When you’re scrolling through the IRS’s website “Where’s My Refund?’ it’s not even clear that there’s even a problem, even though the site has been out of commission since at least Wednesday afternoon”. We anticipate some of the systems will remain unavailable until tomorrow.
Cyber-thieves in 2015 stole as much as $39 million by filing approximately 13,000 fraudulent tax refunds after gaining access to taxpayer information, Koskinen told Congress in June. Otherwise known as phishing, the scheme continues to be on the annual IRS list of “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.
People who filed just before or during the outage don’t need to do anything, the IRS said.
The agency has already detected several systems that have become affected by the outage.
But the IRS said on Thursday that it had now resumed processing individual and business tax returns.
As Americans prepare their tax returns ahead of April’s deadline, the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday announced a “hardware failure” within its computer system had prevented taxpayers from digitally submitting their applicable records. That is especially true now that IRS says they are scaling back their customer service operations to discourage people from calling with questions are we reported recently.
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A spokesperson for the IRS would not release further details. “But I don’t know if you know about a year ago, the identity theft, so there were issues with the IRS online system also”. This report stems from the Associated Press, which writes that while the system interruption may have an adverse effect on refunds, the IRS doesn’t expect “major disruptions”.
