

Groups like the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Intuit and eSmartTax, have opposed any such proposal by saying it would be wildly unpopular and would raise no additional revenue. The IRS would prepare draft returns and send them to eligible taxpayers for review. Treasury Department ammunition for developing a system that would eliminate simpler tax returns by authorizing the IRS to calculate the amount of tax due instead. What the outage does highlight is the risk of relying on a system that has a single point of failure: With paper-based filing, if one post office is closed or is jammed with a long line, another one likely will do the trick.Īnother side effect is that if glitches like this prove commonplace, it could give the U.S. Intuit's share price was flat on Wednesday, down just 1 cent by noon PDT. (That seems to be because more people were turning to the Web-based version, which reported a 4 percent increase in sales.) Sales increased to 6.1 million in 2005 and 6.2 million last year, but were down slightly to 6 million through a comparable period this year.
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Total sales of the desktop software through early 2004 were 5.7 million units. Still, those problems don't seem to have had a substantial negative effect on TurboTax sales. And last week, a Nebraska woman reportedly found a way to access other people's tax returns through Intuit's Web site.

It also accidentally directed customers to a phone number used by a sex chat operation called Intimate Encounters. Two years later, the version of TurboTax designed to handle the 2004 tax year was plagued by glitches and installation problems. In 2003, it embedded flawed antipiracy technology in TurboTax, but was forced to abandon the idea and apologize to customers. This isn't the first time that Intuit has experienced a serious customer-vexing snafu. We're going to continue to work on ways to avoid it in the future." "We just got overwhelmed by it," Gulbransen said. At times, Intuit was reportedly processing 50 to 60 returns per second. Also affected were TurboTax users' attempts to verify whether a previously filed return had been accepted by the IRS and state tax collectors. EDT, they were rejecting customers' attempts to electronically file tax returns. As procrastinating taxpayers came home from work on the East Coast on Tuesday and began to file their returns, the company's servers began to overload.īy around 7 p.m. "We built our systems to (handle that load) and we went above and beyond that." "Every year, we take the busiest minute of the busiest hour of the busiest day and build capacity on that," said Scott Gulbransen, a spokesman for Intuit. Frustrated TurboTax customers who were barred from filing their returns electronically on Tuesday night won't face any penalties for the problems caused by overloaded servers at Intuit.īut the 48-hour reprieve granted by the IRS on Wednesday has not quelled customer ire over how the nation's leading tax-preparation software company could have erred so badly in designing its computer systems.
