FWOb report written by: Mitch Harper
October 15th is the deadline for filing personal income tax returns for those who requested an extension of filing. The number of those filing extensions normally exceeds ten million (10,000,000) returns.
The Internal Revenue Service has notified tax preparers that it will be shutting down e-filing of returns from Saturday, October 11th, 2014 a t3:00 pm to October 14th, 2014 at 5:00 am.
The discretionary event is termed by the IRS as the "Annual Columbus Day Power Outage". Except 'annual' event is normally conducted on Veteran's Day.
Tax preparers are singeing message boards about the inconvenience of the IRS scheduling. The IRS's bureaucratic response to causing headaches for millions of individuals and businesses follows.
As one preparer posted:
On October 3, 2014 our area Stakeholder Liaison Communication, Outreach, Systems and Solutions conference call included the power outage topic. Below is the IRS response to the matter.
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First RE: IRS shutdown
Power Outage for Columbus Day
Issue: IRS will conduct its annual Columbus Day Power Outage beginning Saturday, October 11, 2014 at 3:00 p.m. and ending on Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at 5:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This causes problems for practitioners who are filing returns and resolving rejects.
Response: Annually, the IRS is required to conduct power outages at our Enterprise Computing Center to perform maintenance procedures. Based on several factors, the most prudent time to schedule the outage is the Monday of a holiday weekend. Traditionally, Labor Day weekend has been the first outage. We prefer that the second outage occur over Veterans Day weekend when the holiday results in a Monday office closure. When the Veterans Day holiday is not observed on a Monday, the outage must instead take place over Columbus Day weekend. We are aware that a Columbus Day weekend outage often occurs shortly before the Form 1040 final filing deadline and that this may pose an inconvenience for tax preparers. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Status: Closed
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Another tax preparer commented:
Abate late filing penalties because of the IRS shutdown?? Not likely to happen. The IRS response will be: "You should have filed a paper return." These things are never their fault.
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