IRS Grants Extra Day to File Taxes After Glitches

Those who have procrastinated filing their taxes until the last minute can rest a little easy — for 24 hours, that is.

After the Internal Revenue Service spent several hours on Tuesday dealing with technical difficulties, the agency has bumped back the deadline to file and pay taxes to Wednesday. The service used to file online was partly down throughout the day on Tuesday, CNN reports.

“A number of IRS systems are unavailable at the moment,” said Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter. “We are working to resolve this issue and taxpayers should continue to file their returns as they normally would.”

Taxpayers will now have until midnight on Wednesday, April 18, to file and pay their taxes.

“This is the busiest tax day of the year, and the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers,” Kautter said. “The IRS appreciates everyone’s patience during this period. The extra time will help taxpayers affected by this situation.”

As for the problems behind the glitch, Kautter told members of Congress that the issues seemed to stem from “transmission” of tax returns from software providers like H&R Block and TurboTax. TurboTax is owned by Intuit, which has also addressed the problem.

“Taxpayers should continue to prepare and file their taxes as normal with TurboTax,” an Intuit spokeswoman said. “For those that prepared and filed their taxes with TurboTax earlier today, TurboTax is now submitting those returns to the IRS and is currently processing newly filed returns as normal.”

Fellow tax preparation company H&R Block issued a similar statement.

“While the IRS system is down, we are completing the returns, which will be sent as soon as the IRS system re-opens and will be considered filed on time,” the company said in a statement. “We are encouraging tax payers to continue to use our retail services or our do-it-yourself products as they normally would.”