IRS Warned Congress of "Catastrophic System Failure" Six Months Before Tax Day Outage

IEEE Spectrum: On 17 April 2018, the final day for U.S. citizens to file 2017 tax returns, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) suffered a major system failure related to the hardware supporting its 58-year old, 20-million line Cobol-based Individual Master File system (pdf) which is still being used today to process the vast majority of individual tax returns. As a result of the failure, the IRS extended by a day the filing due date.

Back in 2016, there was another hardware failure that affected the electronic filing of annual tax returns, but luckily, that event happened in February rather than on the April filing due date when millions of returns are typically sent in.

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