Waiting to the last moment

I have, on occasion, done my taxes on the 15th, but it’s always sweating bullets because, well, heck, who wants to worry that TurboTax’s site will be impossible to access because of the traffic?  (I don’t worry about “Midnight at the Post Office — I’ve not mailed in my taxes since, oh, 1995 or so, maybe even earlier than that.)

I thought I was going to be coming down to the wire when I dawdled until last weekend, since I knew the 15th was Sunday.  Gently urged on by Margie (it’s only really nagging when you disagree you need the cajoling), I managed to get everything done in record time on Friday, clicked on submit, and sat back and relaxed.

It was only afterwards that I found out that filing day had been moved back to Tuesday, fergoshsakes.

And … even so … there were still so many people who waited until Tuesday that Intuit’s servers were, yes, impossible to access for some — and it’s telling that the IRS has granted TurboTax users until Thursday to get their returns in.  It would be the tech story of the week, if RIM’s Blackberry service hadn’t melted down for a day or two.

Intuit spokesperson Julie Miller said the company had been prepared to process slightly more than a million returns Tuesday, or twice as many returns as were filed on the due date last year. “But yesterday the volumes across all of Intuit’s tax products were beyond our expectations,” she said.

“The net result was significant slowdown for folks who were submitting their return,” Miller said. “Some had to press the transmit button several times, and their return did get through. Some were not able to submit their return at all.”

The impacted users–which included not only individual TurboTax and TurboTax Freedom users, but accountants and accounting firms that use Intuit’s TurboTax ProSeries and Lacerte products–got messages saying that due to high volume, the system was experiencing delays, and the user should try again later.

Not counting the late-goers, the IRS reported a record 75 million electronic tax returns filed by through Tuesday.

(On the other hand, don’t get me started about a tax system so complex that the government is encouraging folks to use computers to figure it out.  Forget Halliburton — who are the major politicians who own stock in Intuit?)