Schedule your hardware upgrade cycle and lower priority workloads around the event so that you can get your hands on several times more hardware for a month or two.
</tangent>
How big is a tax return? Some XML 10k/100k in size?
What do you need to do: save the file, maybe do some basic sanity checking and store the SSN of a person on a db.
It is complicated, but not impossible.
Obviously you can scale systems ahead of time if you know, but you still run into issues because you probably haven't scaled the entire system and don't know the likely bottlenecks since it's hard to generate that kind of traffic in a QA environment.
Think of the scale of facebook, and then realize most of their payloads are <1k json/protobuf. It's not the size of the payload, it's the delta in quantity.
Note: just about every online store must do the same type of thing around specific holidays.
[0] - https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...
Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.
Because IRS doesn't write the law, that’s Congress's job, and the tax filing deadlines (and the other deadlines that are coordinated relative to them, like the deadline for filing and supplying to taxpayers W-2s, 1099s, etc.) are set in law.
As to why Congress doesn't do it, well, the fact that their are coordinated deadlines for multiple linked processes that different parties have to comply with would produce chaos if 1/12 of taxpayers had a tax deadline each month, and all the linked forms for those taxpayers, and the applicable tax years, had similarly staggered dates. OTOH, if you just gave some taxpayers longer after the availability of forms and end of the (single, consistent) tax year to file, there would be substantial fairness issues.
But be careful what you wish for. The IRS could decide you have to pay your taxes by midnight on your birthday (because it’s easy for you to remember) and then where would you be?
That’s right. Drunk and filing your taxes.
So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know).
Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all.
Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.
Sounds quite complex. I'm surprised they permit it.
Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off.
This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended.
But they aren't likely to do that.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-everyone-can-file-an-ex...
I used Tax Slayer to file an extension, even though my income is above $66k. The UI is clunky. You'll need to estimate your taxes, though.
But thanks. I will look at it.
So, tomorrow, for anyone who is wondering. That's actually meaningful to me. I managed to pull all my records together this morning, so progress.
I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate.
I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good.
I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income.
I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it.
But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.
I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate.
This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.
Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand.
If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem.
I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
There are free e-filing solutions, but not for my income range, and also last I checked (this might be a year or two out of date now) the various state-level agencies do not play well with the free e-filing.
And the paper forms are so easy! The hard part is sometimes figuring out whether you qualify for a particular thing or what a particular piece of income counts as, but that's more or less just as difficult even with software. Actually filling out the paperwork? Almost restful by comparison.
I filed my state the old school way since they don't allow free electronic submissions. To my surprise they cashed the check in 2 days. Although, it's Oklahoma so they're more broke than I am :-)
I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
I can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.
> “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.”
Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed.
The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems.
“While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
