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Comment by metaobject | Hacker News Reader

I realize you're speculating, but ...

I'm not sure if the IRS is trending towards a paperless office or not (is that even still a thing?), but triggering a print job for every form submitted via a web portal sounds very wasteful. I'd hope they have have some sort of workflow system in place instead.

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Another theory I have involves concessions to webserver unions and/or acknowledging the need for time off to take care of the child processes. These fantasies are the only place I can find closure and sanity when my carefully filled out submission is rejected by the website because it is now 4:01 pm and that's Miller Time on the east coast.

You're actually closer than you realize :)

It's a government worker union thing. They don't have a contract for being called at 4am when the website breaks, so you better shut it off at 5pm.

If you think this is the stupidest thing in government you should ensure you never have to work in that environment over your lifetime :)

I'm not sure there are many government web services run by actual government employees.

The IRS hasn't had a budget in many years now. Congress passes emergency reauthorizations every year that's just enough to keep the lights on, but does not allow for any kind of long-term planning or upgrades. I'd imagine that, if they do have crazy systems like this, they'd love to get rid of them but can't.

FWIW Mnuchin wants to boost funding for the IRS: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/steven-mnuchin-makes-a-we...

It sounds good, but I'm going to wait for the budget to actually pass before popping the champagne. Considering everything we've seen so far, my confidence that Trump's appointees will actually live up to their smash-the-system claims, and not just be more crony capitalists, is quite low.

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