But the IRS said on Thursday that it had now resumed processing individual and business tax returns. Other electronic tools and applications, including the “Where’s My Refund” function on the IRS.gov website, were restored earlier.
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The IRS says 90 percent of taxpayers will receive refunds within three weeks.
Taxpayers can continue to send electronic returns to companies that serve as middlemen between taxpayers and the IRS. “The IRS is now in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible”, said the IRS.
“Our processing systems are back in business”.
The IRS statement issued on Wednesday said it expected to have all services back up and running by Thursday. “We apologize for the inconvenience this caused”.
“We have a lot of people who we’ve filed who want to know if they’ve been accepted or not, want to know if it’s going to be held up or not”.
The IRS did not elaborate on what caused the outage, saying that is was “continuing to examine the underlying cause … as well as monitoring any follow-up issues”. But now, these companies have already started filing the returns that were held in limbo.
Apart from the recent outage, the nation’s tax agency has suffered numerous computer-related problems and issues in recent years.
The IRS on Wednesday afternoon stopped being able to accept electronically filed returns.
Taxes are due this year on April 18.
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”.
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The hackers succeeded in gaining access to information from more than 350,000 accounts, federal Inspector General J. Russell George, who oversees the IRS, said in an October management report. “We’re confident that these are not amateurs but organized crime syndicates that not only we, but others in the financial industry are dealing with”, said Commissioner John Koskinen at the time.
