Americans are getting an extra day to file their taxes after key elements of the IRS website crashed on deadline day.
The Internal Revenue Service said individuals or businesses with filings or payments due Tuesday now have until midnight today to complete the task.
Earlier Tuesday, Americans who had waited until the final day to file online got an unwelcome surprise: The agency's website for making payments and gaining access to other key services was down because of what Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin later described as a "high-volume technical issue."
The website was back online late Tuesday.
"This is the busiest tax day of the year, and the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers," acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter said in a statement. "The IRS appreciates everyone's patience during this period. The extra time will help taxpayers affected by this situation."
No additional paperwork is needed to get the one-day extension, said the IRS, which initially urged taxpayers to try to complete their filings ahead of the deadline despite the malfunction, resulting in some confusion about how to go about doing so.
The IRS snafu also caused problems for popular third-party tax preparers such as Turbo Tax and H&R Block. Both said they would hold on to customer tax returns and file after the IRS system reopened.
Every year the IRS processes more than 120 million tax returns that arrive by mid-April and spits back some $300 billion in refunds. Last year, about 90 percent of returns submitted by April 21 were electronically filed, according to IRS data.
The agency did not say how many people were affected by Tuesday's failure. But last year, about 5 million tax returns were filed on the final day of the traditional tax season.
This year, tax day fell on April 17 because April 15 was a Sunday and April 16 was Emancipation Day, a holiday in Washington.
The IRS said the failure appeared to be from a hardware issue. It provided no further details on the cause or severity of the problem.
Former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen warned last year of a possible system failure, partly because of underfunding of the agency. Among the areas that he said were underfunded were the agency's aging information systems.
In October, two senior IRS officials warned that the agency's systems were at high risk for a crash.
"We are concerned that the potential for a catastrophic system failure is increasing as our infrastructure continues to age. Thus, replacing this aging IT infrastructure is a high priority for the IRS," Jeffrey Tribiano, deputy commissioner for operations support, and Silvana Gina Garza, chief information officer, wrote in prepared testimony.
On Tuesday morning, Kautter said at a congressional oversight hearing that the IRS had prioritized the core filing system in its technology spending.
Still, he lamented the fact that much of the IRS' computing hardware is obsolete and that a significant portion of its software needs updating. He said the agency faces more than 2 million attempted cyberattacks per day and that it desperately needed more resources to upgrade its systems and to bolster its defenses.
Mark Everson, the vice chairman of tax advisory firm AlliantGroup LP, who served as IRS commissioner from 2003-07, said the system failure showed that Congress has to work with the IRS to ensure the agency has appropriate funding.
"A problem on tax day is every commissioner's worst nightmare," Everson said. "The filing season is always job one."
House lawmakers are scheduled to vote this week on a package of bipartisan bills to retool the agency -- including modernizing its information technology systems.
The package wouldn't require appropriators to provide additional money to the agency.
COMPLAINTS, COMPLAINTS
Frustrated taxpayers and baffled observers took to social media to complain about Tuesday's outage. Political leaders weighed in as well.
Democrats quickly blamed federal budget cuts to the IRS as part of the problem and pushed to protect taxpayers from penalties.
"We know for certain the IRS' lack of funding is compounding these kinds of problems," said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. "We don't want taxpayers and middle-class folks and small businesses penalized. They didn't do anything wrong."
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010-17 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
Republicans have targeted the agency for budget cuts since taking control of the House in 2011, though they relented a bit this year to help it implement their sweeping tax-cut bill passed last year.
Yet even some Republican lawmakers expressed frustration with the agency's performance Tuesday.
"Unfortunately, it's another example where they're not capable of dealing with the volume," said Sen Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who has called for massive changes at the IRS partly because of the agency's technological shortcomings.
"This is game-day for the IRS, and it seems the IRS can't get out of the locker room," said Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont.
The episode recalled other high-profile government technology breakdowns, such as the challenging launch of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and raised fresh questions about whether the IRS is prepared for the overhaul that is required under last year's tax bill.
As part of that effort, the IRS has been working with businesses to make sure they are withholding the correct amount from workers' paychecks as well as rolling out online tools that workers can use to ensure their employers calculations are correct.
Koskinen said Tuesday that the agency's computer system had deteriorated after years of neglect and that it likely crashed as a result of increased strain ahead of the filing deadline.
"I kept telling Congress, if funding continues to be constrained, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when the system fails," said Koskinen, who filed his taxes over the weekend. "You really are rolling the dice when you operate that way."
The failure caught at least one White House official off-guard. Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump's top economic adviser, appeared not to know about the problems when asked about them shortly after noon Tuesday.
"The IRS is crashing?" he said, repeating a reporter's question. "It sounds horrible. It sounds really bad. Hope it gets fixed."
The IRS typically recommends that taxpayers use electronic filing to avoid common mistakes. Online filing is quicker than dropping something in the mail -- when the site works, of course.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah Skidmore Sell and Holly Ramer of The Associated Press; by Jeff Stein, Damian Paletta and Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post; and by Alan Rappeport of The New York Times.
A Section on 04/18/2018