The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has graciously extended the ability for people to file their annual tax returns to April 18 after its systems managed to go offline a lot of April 17, the day by which taxpayers were required to file their paperwork.

The system crash, described by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as a “high-volume technical issue,” saw people trying to do the right thing in terms of paying taxes presented with this message: “This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

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

The IRS outage also affected third-party services that rely on taxman’s system to be working, including TurboTax and H&R Block.

At the same time the IRS tax filing system was offline, Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter was testifying before a Congressional hearing, not only mentioning the outage, saying that “we are working to resolve this issue and taxpayers should continue to file their returns as they normally would,” but also attempting to deflect blame.

“Of the IRS hardware, 59 percent of it is obsolete,” Kutter said. “Thirty-two percent of its software is at least two updates behind.” Because this is 2018, Kutter also implied Russians are to blame, saying that “the IRS systems are subject to 2.5 million cyberattacks a day, 1 million of which are sophisticated attacks.”

In written testimony, Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said that “aged information technology hardware, when combined with the fact that components of the infrastructure and systems are interrelated and interdependent, make outages and failures unpredictable and introduce security risks to critical taxpayer data.”

Some of those systems are said to date back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, although as U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly pointed out, that may be a good thing: Chinese hackers “don’t know how to hack COBOL systems.”

Photo: soukup/Flickr