I hate to pile on when a guy's down, but ..... just in case you're a) not a ProSeries or Lacerte user, and b) you're relaxing today and not following the news, you've not heard that Intuit suffered what's being termed "massive server failures" yesterday. As a result tens of thousands of their customers hit a brick wall when trying to efile their last-minute tax returns. The mainstream media is full of TurboTax user stories so we'll not go there (heck, we all think they got what they deserve for doing their own returns, right?) but rather we'll discuss the practicing professional firms who got caught in the middle.
In a telephone conversation a few minutes ago with Intuit VP Sasan Goodarzi I was told yesterday's problem was an "equipment failure" 
exacerbated by very heavy volume. Goodarzi, who had stepped out of a planning meeting where executives were discussing "how to make sure this would never happen again", insisted that the company was properly prepared for yesterdays unprecedented volume and that the equipment problems were actually unrelated to volume but that the onslaught of last minute returns made recovery problematic. He also emphasized that Intuit was in conversations with the IRS relative to the last minute filing problems and he believed no penalties would be assessed to taxpayers affected by the slowdown. [EDITORS NOTE: Most practitioners are aware that the IRS has an unofficial policy of not assessing penalties on returns filed a day or two late. An IRS spokesperson reportedly commented that "the IRS will hold taxpayers harmless that encountered these problems last night.'' This"deal" with the IRS most assuredly falls into that category.] All returns pushed to the Intuit servers yesterday have now been processed and filed with the IRS --- if you're a ProSeries or Lacerte user you can check your client's efile status within your respective program.
Other tax compliance vendors (Thomson, CCH, and Drake) said that their volumes were also extremely heavy but none reported any significant throughput problems.
Better luck next year ........
gll
