Thousands of federal income tax returns in New Jersey and around the nation will be delayed for at least one day as the IRS has announced a nationwide outage of it's electronic filing system.
According to officials at the IRS, the treasury experienced a hardware failure Wednesday afternoon that affected a number of tax processing systems, which are currently unavailable.
"Several of our systems are not currently operating, including our modernized e-file system and a number of other related systems. We are currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible. We anticipate some of the systems will remain unavailable until Thursday", officials said.
The IRS remains in close contact with e-file software transmitters and the tax community during this period officials said.
IRS officials reminded tax payers that a number of taxpayer and tax practitioner tools are unavailable during this outage period but IRS.gov remains available, although a number of the services on the site are not, including Where’s My Refund.
Taxpayers can continue to prepare and file their tax returns as they normally would. Taxpayers can continue to send their tax returns to their e-file provider; these companies will hold the tax returns until the IRS resumes accepting electronic tax returns. Taxpayers who have already filed their tax returns do not need to take any additional action officials said.
The scope of the outage is being assessed at t this time and the IRS does not anticipate major refund disruptions officials said.
"We continue to expect that 9 out of 10 taxpayers will receive their refunds within 21 days", officials concluded.