Almost 24 hours after first announcing that a “hardware failure” caused several of its tax processing systems and tools to go down, the IRS said late Thursday afternoon that some of its programs were back up and running.
But not all. Among them, the system that process electronically filed returns was still down.
“We are continuing our work and analysis of our return processing system; we hope to have that back up again running at some point today,” the agency said.
With tax filing season in full swing, the technical breakdown came at an inopportune time.
But the IRS said again that it did not anticipate major delays in issuing refunds. “We continue to expect that 9 out of 10 taxpayers will [be] issued their refunds within 21 days.”
It also stressed that taxpayers may continue to prepare and file their returns as normal. E-file providers, such as H&R Block and TurboTax, will hold the returns until the IRS systems can start receiving them again.
Any taxpayers who filed their returns prior to the outage don’t need to take further action, the IRS added.
It’s not clear how many people have already filed. At this time last year, roughly 27 million filers’ returns had been processed — and almost of all them had been e-filed. And more than 19.5 million of those filers were due refunds, averaging $3,366.
Taxes are due this year on April 18.
Outdated technology
The IRS systems aren’t exactly at the cutting edge of technology. Thanks to persistent budget cuts, the agency’s efforts to modernize its technologies have been held up, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a Senate panel in February 2015.
“We’re running applications we were running when John F. Kennedy was president,” Koskinen told lawmakers.
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 one senator asked how the agency could still be using such old systems when it spends over $2 billion a year on technology operations, Koskinen explained that the money has been going into upgrading its systems, which were customized for the IRS in the 1950s and 1960s.