Those who are still late to file their taxes might have a chance to do so thanks to an outage affecting the online payment service, Direct Pay, which prevents tax filers from pulling from their bank accounts. This leaves only debit and credit cards as working payment methods, which results in a fee. Luckily, Tax Day has been extended to compensate for the failure of IRS systems.
The Direct Pay service went down early morning on April 17 as part of a widespread failure of the IRS electronic filing system. This failure was likely caused by a massive influx of tax filers trying to get their taxes in before the deadline, which has now been extended to April 18 due to the service outages. That means late filers have until midnight to file.Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced later Tuesday that the deadline would be extended one day due to the outage. He made this announcement at an event in Derry, New Hampshire, where he was speaking to a crowd about President Trump’s tax overhaul with Ivanka Trump.
According to the IRS, over 5 million people were expected to file taxes on April 17. Usually, taxes are expected to be in by April 15 but the normal tax day fell on Emancipation Day, a holiday only celebrated in Washington D.C.
Tax filers eager to get the task over with can still pay using a card but watch for fees associated with using payment methods other than bank accounts. For those watching their wallets, it’s still best to wait for the outage to be fixed and just use a bank account.
Intuit Turbotax users are advised to file their taxes through Turbotax as they normally would, but filed taxes will be held for longer while the system is being restored.
Taxes can be used for a lot of things like necessities, tuition, and food, but consider using that tax refund to buy some of the best upcoming video games of this year.
