Flickr photo via DonkeyHotey
Flickr photo via DonkeyHotey

The initial headlines were enough to take one’s breath away: “Internal Revenue Service reports computer troubles,” or “IRS computers crash.”

It’s this kind of headline that sets one to fantasizing. We want the country to have enough revenue to pay its bills, but what if just a few returns were lost and some people, maybe including me, got a year reprieve from the taxman?

It was not to be. The IRS says now that it suspects a hardware glitch caused Thursday’s system outage, which stalled the processing of tax returns.

“IRS teams worked throughout the night and around the clock on this system outage,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in a statement. “Our processing systems are back in business. Taxpayers should see little, if any, impact on their tax returns or refunds.”

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