The Internal Revenue Service is extending its tax filing deadline by one day to U.S. residents because of a technical glitch that affected the agency’s website.
The IRS said Tuesday that taxpayers would have until the end of Wednesday to file their taxes without penalties, according to media reports.
The problem started early Tuesday when the “Direct Pay” option on the IRS’s website went offline, creating panic among those who had waited until the last minute to file their taxes. Public outcry over the IRS glitch prompted David Kautter, the IRS’s acting commissioner, to tell lawmakers during a House Oversight Committee hearing Tuesday that the agency was working on a fix and that taxpayers wouldn’t be penalized.
“This is the busiest tax day of the year, and the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers,” Kautter said in a statement.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged the online snafu during a media event in New Hampshire and said that people wouldn’t be penalized, the Associated Press reported.
“We’ll make sure taxpayers have extensions once the system comes up to make sure they can use it and it in no way impacts people paying their taxes,” Mnuchin said. “It was just a technical issue we’re working through. A high volume technical issue that impacted the system.”
Although the IRS has not said what went wrong with its website, the The Washington Post reported, citing an unnamed government source, that it may have crashed because of high traffic.
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As of Tuesday afternoon, the IRS’s Direct Pay option appeared to be back online.
