Last-Minute Tax Woes

Posted on Apr 18, 2007

A deluge of tax procrastinators attempting to file electronically before the midnight deadline on Tuesday slowed the TurboTax servers to a crawl, causing wait times in the hours. A spokesman for the company that makes the popular tax preparation software said it was “absolutely amazing” how many people had waited until the last possible moment.

AP via Yahoo:

A flood of last-minute tax filers swamped the servers of the company that makes the popular TurboTax and ProSeries tax software Tuesday, forcing taxpayers to wait hours for confirmation that their electronic returns had been submitted successfully.

A record number of returns from both individual taxpayers and accountants started causing delays in Intuit Inc.’s e-filing system early Tuesday, and the problem got worse as the midnight deadline for getting forms to the Internal Revenue Service approached, said Harry Pforzheimer, a company spokesman.

“The amount of filing that has been done today has been absolutely amazing, and we are doing everything we possibly can to expand capabilities of servers,” Pforzheimer said. During times of peak of demand, Intuit was processing 50 to 60 returns per second, he said.

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