H&R Block Software Glitch To Delay 600,000 U.S. Tax Refunds

mrquagmire sends this quote from a Reuters report: "Tax refunds for about 600,000 taxpayers claiming an education credit will be delayed, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday, citing a software glitch at some tax-preparation companies, including industry leader H&R Block Inc. Refunds may be delayed four to six weeks from mid-February, likely not showing up until late March, the IRS said. ... On Tuesday, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc executive said shoppers had cashed about $2.7 billion in tax refund checks at its U.S. stores so far this year. At this point last year, that amount was about $4 billion. The IRS delayed the start of the tax filing season by eight days, to January 30, due to the enactment of tax law changes made to resolve the "fiscal cliff."

Enterprise Code

[ButchDeLoria]

Business quality meets government efficiency.

Re:

[alphatel]

Once, about 20 years ago, I went to a newly opened H&R branch. There I met a nice gentleman who took all my tax info (and my check), and told me to come back in April to sign everything and get it sent off. Having completely forgotten about everything, I showed up April 14th, and to my surprise not only did the nice fellow vanish, but all the paperwork I had put together was missing (apparently there was no record of me in the computer). I was forced to file late and pay a cute fine.

I figured if they

Re:

[ButchDeLoria]

Sounds more like someone was posing as an employee to get your financial info.

Re:

[demonlapin]

Not that it helps much in your case, but for those who find themselves in a similar situation, file for an extension (six months is automatic) and take a look at your previous year's tax return. Unless you have had a change in income or deductions, just be sure that your withheld tax on your W2 is equal to or greater than your actual tax liability the previous year. If it's not, write the IRS the largest check you can afford to write and send it in. You'll get back any overpayments when you file your retur

Re:

[slick7]

Business quality meets government efficiency.

That's no glitch, it's a feature filled app.

Re:Damn you Walmart!

[Doug Otto]

The people that cash checks at Walmart, typically, have no bank. The businesses that Walmart is hurting with this service are the sleazeball check cashing folks. I'm not quite sure which way to feel about that.

Re:

[tibit]

+1 informative. You're spot on.

Re:

[TsuruchiBrian]

I feel like $3-$6 is quite reasonable. That's about how much an ATM charges to withdraw money. I don't think walmart is actually as evil as people think. There are companies whose success I feel is much more detrimental to the community as a whole, particularly those which have no bid contracts with the government.

Re:

[demonlapin]

Wal-Mart is only considered evil by a few hardcore leftists and a bunch of people who wouldn't be caught dead in there even if it paid high wages to its employees. Actual poor people love Wal-Mart, because it's so much less expensive and so much nicer in terms of quality and selection than the stores that preceded it.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Wal-Mart is only considered evil by a few hardcore leftists and a bunch of people who wouldn't be caught dead in there even if it paid high wages to its employees. Actual poor people love Wal-Mart, because it's so much less expensive and so much nicer in terms of quality and selection than the stores that preceded it.

From experience, Wal-Mart is no cheaper than regular stores. Well, unless you are at the point in your life where 13 cents off a $50 item is a big deal.

If Wal-Mart's regular prices are cheaper

Re:

[demonlapin]

Of course most of their stuff is low quality, but it's better quality than what poor people had thirty years ago. I grocery shop there because my experience has been that it's considerably cheaper than Kroger for staples (though I don't buy steaks or cheese there), and that WM quality is usually good enough, because most of the time I'm not planning on abusing something. When I do plan to use something heavily, I shop elsewhere.

Sometimes quantity has its own quality, too - I wear $25 Under Armour T-shirts

Re:

[TsuruchiBrian]

That's a pretty broad generalization. For one thing, many hardcore leftists are actually poor. Many of my friends fall into this category. Also many of the people complaining about Walmart's business practices are it's employees and contractors who tend not to be high up on the socio-economic scale.

I personally don't find many of these complaints very interesting because nobody is forced to work at walmart or be one of their contractors. If the best job you can find is working for/at walmart, you should

Re:

[demonlapin]

I never said the hardcore lefties were hypocritical, just that they were far enough into the movement that ideology would trump any practical considerations. I don't mind the True Believers who won't shop there even though they're poor; it's the people who wax poetic about Costco and keep asking why Wal-Mart can't be more like Costco when they'd never be caught dead in a Wal-Mart even if it were run just like Costco that drive me up a wall.

I also live in a poor part of the South, where the alternative to W

Re:

[TsuruchiBrian]

I wasn't suggesting that you were implying they were hardcore lefties were hypocrites. I was just pointing out that all actually poor people don't love walmart. I don't even care about people who dislike walmart shopping there. I don't find it necessarily hypocritical. For one thing, one of the primary complaints of walmart is that it drives out other businesses (leaving only walmart to shop at). While this may be true, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. But even for someone who doesn't li

Re:

[djh2400]

Consider it this way:

Say you get a $250 check each week, which you take to Walmart to have cashed. If they take out $6, then they are removing 2.4% of your paycheck. If you get a paycheck each week, then you will get 52 paychecks in a year.

With a simple compounding-interest formula, they are making [ ( 1 + 0.024 ) ^ 52 = 3.43 ] or 343% interest on your paychecks.

Re:

[djh2400]

You know, I'm not sure this way of looking at it actually makes sense. I might need to think about this a little more. Still, why not open a bank account and forego the fees?

Re:

[TsuruchiBrian]

It's $3 for checks under $1000 and $6 for checks over $1000.

The reason I say it's a good deal, is not that I think it's fine to pay $3 per paycheck. That's stupid when you can just open a bank account. The reason banks offer free checking, is because they get to invest the money remaining in your account and keep the profit, and maybe pay you a small interest rate. They make their money (just not directly from you). Walmart is essentially running a bank where every time money is deposited via check, it

Re:

[tompaulco]

Check Cashing outfits do more to keep the lower class down than any 1%-er ever did. They need to be closed down. Next, we can go for the pawn shops, which exist solely to act as a fence for stolen property and thus to continue the cycle of poverty.

Re:

[thomasw_lrd]

That may be true in some places. Where I live, if you find your stolen good at the pawn shop, you still have to pay for it to get it back. It's a real pain in the ass.

a software glitch, ha?

[roman_mir]

A software glitch?

I have a feeling that this software glitch is not really a bug, it's just when this function executed:

getTotalAvailableFederalBalance()

it returned 0, and somewhere along the line it triggered a condition known as: TreasuryIsBareException

Easily Handled

[Frankie70]

try
{
        avail = getTotalAvailableFederalBalance();
}
catch(TreasuryIsBareException e)
{
        printMoreMoney();
}

Re:

[roman_mir]

I hate when parentheses are on individual lines like that.

try {
avail = getTotalAvailableFederalBalance();
} catch(TreasuryIsBareException e) {
printMoreMoney();
}

the reason that the condition printMoreMoney() requires a few weeks delay of-course is that it has to go through the usual route of:

Treasury.issueNewDebt() ...
Fed.issueNewCredit()...
MemberBanks.useNewFedCreditToBuyTreasuryDebt()....

only th

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't
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know how it is so much
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eaiser
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to read
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this
}
}
}
}

than {
to read {
this
text {
which
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is the way
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I prefer
}

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

that I may stack multiple parenthesis on the same line.

- BURN IN FIRE!

Re:

[TsuruchiBrian]

I like to stack all my parentheses at the beginning of the file and all the semi colons at the end of the file ke this:

(){(){}}

void foo

if bar != 0

bar++

return bar

;;

The code doesn't compile or even convey any semantic correctness, but it is more aesthetically pleasing.

Re:

[JustOK]

I just use butterflies.

Re:

[drcheap]

I just use butterflies.

And I use braces .. or "curly brackets" for the vocabularily challenged.

Re:

[tompaulco]

People just don't get how printing more money is detrimental. I use a pizza analogy. let's say you have a pizza cut into 8 slices and you have 16 people. The pizza economy says "There is not enough pizza to feed all of these people". The government answers "we will issue more slices", then proceeds to cut the pizza into 16 slices instead of 8.

Re:

[drcheap]

Your pizza analogy is redistribution not inflation.

I think it kinda works...

A "slice" is just some arbitrary unit of measure just like a "dollar" is. There is some initial % of the whole for which it represents, and that is it's value. Basically he's saying that because the quantity of slices has increased, but the overall finite resource they came from hasn't changed a bit. The value of a slice is decreased because there are more of them, causing each one to be a smaller % of the whole pie.

It's a little different conceptually in that it re-defines the b

Re:

[roman_mir]

Your analogy uses pizza, which is a product, not a currency, that's why it's not very clear, but you are correct, it does kind of work, people's real incomes are getting smaller and their real savings are getting smaller, so it's like slices of pizza are getting smaller.

Here is a clarification: everybody has to pay some money to get a slice of pizza. Government says: we must grow the economy and so we will issue more money.

Notice that the government cannot issue more pizza. The economy is the pizza, not

Re:

[fascismforthepeople]

people's real incomes are getting smaller

Don't try to pretend that all of a sudden you are against that. You have repeatedly argued for lower wages for workers. You have repeatedly argued for stripping workers of all their rights. You have repeatedly argued for removing all dignity from workers. You have repeatedly argued for giving even more power to employers.

You have repeatedly made arguments for a fascist society. You are a voice for a religious movement that aims to produce nothing less than fascism for the people.

Re:

[roman_mir]

BTW., I thought about your pizza example and using just one item (not pizza AND currency at the same time, but only pizza) to explain inflation.

Here is how it can be explained:

If people used pizzas for barter, then inflation would be government clipping pizza ;)

What I means is that government would be thinning the crust, putting fewer toppings on, it would use the extra dough and toppings to issue more pizzas, but the pizzas would have less and less nutritional value. Then in the free market people would n

Re:

[roman_mir]

Whoever moderated that, you think that was funny? Then wait until my grand finale, where I explain the algorithm for bombing foreign brown civilians and aiming at kids with predator drones by US military.

Something similar to: "You just don't lead them as much" is part of it.

Re:

[roman_mir]

Yes, gov't shill, we know all about your priorities, between murdering kids and losing some money you will choose murdering kids. Everytime.

Not surprising according to what they told me

[metalheadsunite]

I filed in late January and they told me at that time that the IRS wasn't accepting education credit submissions until late February and would delay refunds for about 2 months. Interesting that they now come out and say it was a software glitch.

Re:

[dustbunny26]

Actually no, it wasn't an IRS software glitch. I work for the IRS and.... 1) the IRS is trying to catch people who are abusing the system (I know, cheaters, really?) so a lot of reprogramming was done. That's why the Form 8863 (Education Credit) processing was delayed until February 14. 2) H&R Block's software IS dropping two lines which caused the problems.

Re:

[ButchDeLoria]

Trashy people that get their paychecks paid out at liquor stores.

Re:

[Enderandrew]

People who owe banks money and thusly can't keep a checking account.

Or impatient people who want to spend their refund before receiving it.

Re:

[tibit]

That's somewhat bigoted. If you have an excessive amount of bounced payments or overdraft fees, a bank may decide to close your account and not let you reopen it. Apparently banks share this information with other banks, so that once you're blacklisted, you can't have a checking account for a few years.

Re:

[rmdingler]

Well, for one, morons who are attempting not to run checks through a personal/business account for purposes involving tax dodgery. In addition, most major banks charge a fee to non-customers anyway...Chase and Wells Fargo charge 5 or 6 bucks per check.

Re:

[flimflammer]

Anyone with garnishments levied against them?

Re:

[onkelonkel]

One of my school buddies had an excessively casual relationship with debts vis a vis debt repayments and ended up with his wages garnisheed. I am almost certain that the money was taken off before his employer wrote his paycheck.

Re:

[tibit]

That's exactly how it works. An alternative may be a chapter 13 bankruptcy, where you're forced into a 3-5 year payment plan. Your creditors are paid first, and you get paid what's left.

Re:

[ArhcAngel]

Yep...Had a coworker quit his associate degree course at DeVry to take the job with us. Six months later he starts getting debt repayment notices for the school. By his reasoning he didn't owe any money since he didn't finish taking the classes (Yes he really believed this) so another six months go by and one day he just starts cussing and screaming obscenities. His check was less than $20! It was a very good day...he was a dick.


Many who cash their checks this way are illegals who do not have a checking

Re:

[tompaulco]

What sort of moron thinks that cashing check always requires paying a fee to cash a check?

Re:

[JustOK]

Anyone who uses a bank.

I read that as...

[dAzED1]

I read that as "last year, people who shop at Walmart gave the government $4Billion in interest-free loans, by overpaying throughout the year."

I'm just funny that way....

Re:

[tibit]

But you can adjust your withholdings by setting an artificially high number of dependents so that you get those credits back throughout the year!

Re:

[tompaulco]

But you can adjust your withholdings by setting an artificially high number of dependents so that you get those credits back throughout the year!

You can only withhold up to the point where they take nothing out. In many cases of Child or Earned Income Credit, there is nothing being withheld, and they will still receive a "refund" at the end of the year. But the employer is not about to start paying you advances on EIC.

Re:

[tibit]

Ahh, yes, for those who have negative federal tax you'd be right of course.

Read this as tongue in cheek:

[rmdingler]

Ah, so you're making fun of the Americans' "voluntary" income tax payments?

Re:

[mythosaz]

Unless you're someone who needs a "forced" piggy bank, you should do your best to either:

(a) owe exactly nothing, unless you like giving out 0% loans, or
(b) pay as much as possible without incurring a penalty for underpayment, provided you can use and pay back a 0% loan.

Anyone getting a check gave a 0% loan.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 informative. That ass-clown is a fucking moron. And since the threshold for the 25% MARGINAL rate is 70,000, he overpaid $7,000 in taxes. Seriously, who's the bigger idiot - the guy who overpays his taxes to get an unscheduled payday or the guy who overpays $7,000 because he's an idiot?

Also note - there is no tax penalty for underpayment if you underpaid by = the previous year's tax, or you paid no taxes in the previous year.

Re:

[tompaulco]

To elaborate on what the rude anonymous coward said, you would have had to pay 25% on the dollars that put you over the bracket, but 15% on all the ones under that bracket. In your case, it sounds like you would have paid 25% on 1 or possibly zero dollars.

Re:

[Pathwalker]

Note that the IRS does pay (pretty good) interest, if they owe you enough.

I found that out one year when cleaning up the mess resulting from a forced stock sale (due to a takeover) and a broker that did backup withholding for the entire amount, ignoring the cost basis; but reported to me that a smaller number of shares had been sold, and that nothing had been deducted. After a few go-rounds I got the corrected paperwork in June, and filed a 1040X.

The extra check for the interest was a nice surprise.

Re:

[tompaulco]

I also received interest one year due to a corrective filing worked out between me and my father to make me an independent so I could qualify for student loans, which I otherwise couldn't get because my family made too much money as defined by the student loan organizations, but not enough money to send me to school, as defined by the amount of money it costs to go to school.
Anyway, I ended up getting money back, plus interest. My father ended up having to pay more taxes, plus interest and penalties. Even

Re:

[makubesu]

Considering the current rate I'm getting on my savings account, I'd just be giving a free loan to the banks instead!

H&R block is for suckers anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

They charge ungodly amounts of money for starters. Me, Im single, I work one job, own one home, one car and everything in my life is very simple and so are my taxes but they insist on charging me 145 dollars to do my taxes. It used to be like 65 but every year it goes up and my taxes actually take like 15 minutes to do. Then they start sales pitching me on buying optional services and gurantees and so on on top of 145.

So I started doing my taxes online for free through simple google searches for a couple ye

Re:

[cheater512]

I use an accountant because my tax isn't simple.

However here in Australia if your tax is simple to moderately complicated you can easily file it using a government program called e-tax. Been around for years (and looks like a Windows 3.1 program).
It guides you through everything as a wizard fill in the blanks sort of thing. Very simple.
It even grabs your data from previous years so you don't sit there filling out the same info every time. It knows who you are.

Re:

[whoever57]

However here in Australia if your tax is simple to moderately complicated you can easily file it using a government program called e-tax. Been around for years (and looks like a Windows 3.1 program).

In the UK, the tax system is setup so that for most people with simple incomes (single job, no offshore bank accounts, and perhaps a mortgage) will have had the correct amount of tax deducted (or credited) at source and they don't need to file a return.

Re:

[tibit]

I used to do my taxes myself, but turbotax online is not cheaper than my time, so I go that route. For someone with a simpler tax situation of course it may be different. There are benefits to online filing, though -- the refund can be much quicker, if you are getting one, that is.

Re:

[EmagGeek]

My wife and I have a somewhat complex tax situation. We both have 1099 income, and we have three rental properties between us - one jointly owned, and the other two are pre-marital property. I also have my regular W2 income from the business I own.

H&R Block wanted $5000 to do our taxes and the taxes for my corp, because they were "very complex and intricate and required special attention of a whole team of tax professionals," when our regular CPA whom we've used for years is $650.

These "professional" ta

Misleading

[letherial]

First, this is old news, way old news....its done and gone
Second, it was a IRS software glitch, that effected every education form...the article title tries to imply that its H&R block and thats just misleading.

So they hire IT guys as well with no experience wh

[Joe_Dragon]

So they hire IT guys as well with no experience who only work for tax season ?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad H&R Block has finally received some attention in any aspect of their IT practices, even if it was due to an issue with the IRS.

As an old employee who worked on the IT side dealing with their branch office systems I've witnessed absolutely frightening security practices. I'm talking about thousands of unencrypted tax returns sitting on desktops in vacant (sometimes for 6+ months) offices. In the area that I worked (inner-city) these offices were regularly broken into by the homeless. Servers wou

SIGSEGV

[stox]

Dump Congress?

Ah! That explains!

[Mister Liberty]

--
  no sig

whoopsies!

[Jedunnigan]

What was that about being 'professionals' with all the right 'credentials'? How much did you spend on that last little media blitz? Way to eat your own shit HR block. You and Turbo Tax want a room for all that stank?

Re:

[ButchDeLoria]

And so I told that ther teachin' lady, the only letters I need tuh know is 'U', 'S'. and 'A'.