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Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

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sheetjs·

The IRS EIN Application also has "hours":

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

> Our new hours of operation [for the application] are Monday through Friday 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

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The Canada Revenue Agency's web apps are closed overnight too (albeit only for 3 hours). My understanding from talking to one of their sysadmins is that they use this time to perform backups and software upgrades because it's less error-prone than trying to do those "live".

They also only support IE. (Or at least they did last year.)

You can also find some documentation speaking about Netscape.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ntcs/scrty_tls-eng.html

I've never had any problems using using Chrome on the CRA website.

Is there a good reason to do this? I'm actually curious

In Nevada (where I pay my corporate taxes) it was claimed that hours restrictions were mandated by law ("No part of the office can be open outside of the following hours" kind of thing) I have yet to find the statute though that says that. I agree it is a very weird thing.

I guess it gives you a free maintenance window every night.

Not that this is a good reason, but one possibility is that the backend could require human interaction. Perhaps when the form gets submitted it gets automatically sent to a printer where a person manually files it. I could see a process like that showing up on http://thedailywtf.com ...

Define "good."

It's pretty common when you've got a mainframe-type system that needs to do a bunch of batch processing and report generation. It's an excellent way to ensure that no data will be altered while the reports are running.

Aligning operating hours with when you have active staff monitoring and responding would be a reasonable assumption.

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