This only pampers the procrastinating crowd even more....

Intuit should post a refund to everybody who had the smarts not to participate in this mass meltdown. Taxes are inevitable, you might as well *file* long before the deadline and *pay* at the deadline.

Anybody who trusts a computer system at the receiving end of mass hysteria to perform flawlessly should work through the following exercise:

You are at a rock concert, with 10000 fans. The concert ends at 10:00 pm. Starting at 10:00pm a 10 busses will ride every 6 minutes until 12:00 am. Each bus has a capacity of 100 fans. You and 50% of the audience decide to stay until the last bus.

How many of you will have to walk home?

***Not the bandwidth, not the hardware, but an intermittent database issue, was to blame for Tuesday's "serious and painful" delay for customers.***

Could it be that Simon and the PFY were doing a bit of moonlighting?? <G>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that you must pay when you file. The payment and filing papers must be in the same envelope. I wouldn't blame the last-minute taxpayers at all. Intuit says they can handle the load, so if they can't, the fault is clearly on them. Having said that, I filed my taxes in March. The way I see it, the only reason to wait until the last minute (especially if you're doing the taxes yourself, either by paper, phone, or software) is if you don't have the money. The people who wait until the last minute to pay because they want that extra bank interest on the money they'll be paying are just asking for trouble.

Postage stamps still work. Print your return, sign it, then drop it in the US mail. Until filing electronically costs about the same as a few stamps, that's how I'll be filing.

I drove

"This is not the experience customers have come to expect from Intuit. It’s not acceptable to us, and we will do right by our customers who were impacted..."

Oh, really? I regularly expect poor service from Intuit. Particularly since I use the Mac version of Quicken. I wonder how big a D.C. lobby Intuit and other tax-perp [sic] vendors have; in my state, it's "free" to file electronically, no matter who you are, and they'll take the funds as a n EFT or let you print a voucher to go with a check if you owe. Why can't the IRS make it as simple? It's not currently in their interest to do so.