No Penalty for Tax Filers Hit by Glitch

Illinois Department of Revenue Store Keeper Danny Morres moves Illinois 1040 tax forms toward the Document and Control Center for processing at the Illinois Department of Revenue in Springfield, Ill., Monday, April 16, 2007. The Illinois Department of Revenue expects tp process 5.7 million individual income returns this season. Almost one half of of the returns are received within the last two weeks of filing. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman) (Seth Perlman - AP)

"I just kept sending it until it got through _ it was stopping my work process and I wanted those things out of my hair," he said. "Eventually there must have been a little gap and it would get through."

Fachner said he had no plans to stop using Intuit software.

"If it had been happening in March, I would have been a little upset _ that would have shown their systems weren't in good order," he said. "But on the 16th and 17th of April, with the volumes they were getting hit with, I can't say it's their fault."

Kansas City, Mo.-based H&R Block Inc., whose TaxCut software also allows people to file electronically, said Wednesday it did not experience any slowdowns despite a similar spike in traffic. The company did not provide details on the number of filings it received.

Technology experts were flabbergasted that Intuit was caught off guard by a surge in activity on its busiest day of the year.

"The irony is that most servers are just at 18 to 20 percent of their capacity. This was probably not a capacity issue but a configuration issue," said Bruce Milne, vice president of products and marketing for HyPerformix Inc., an Austin, Texas-based company that makes IT capacity planning software. "They probably could have avoided this whole thing altogether without a lot of extra expense" by performing more capacity analysis beforehand, he said.

Miller, the Intuit spokeswoman, said the company is studying ways to ensure the delays don't occur again next year.

"We had quite a bit of backlog that cleared itself out overnight as we came off the peak," Miller said. "Volume was a key contributor to this, but we're going to dig under and try to understand it from a technology perspective."

At the peak, Intuit was processing 50 to 60 returns per second.

Last month, the company said it had sold nearly 11 million copies of its TurboTax federal software as of March 17, although not everybody who uses the tax preparation software files electronically.

Shares of Intuit rose 5 cents to close at $29.45 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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