Does the IRS not know about Pacific Time?

July 15, 2020 10:59 PM

I'm trying to make my tax payment online in time for today's US tax deadline, and both DirectPay and one of the private payment partner sites are acting like it's the 16th already. I know I pushed it to the deadline, but I've been trying to do this since 8:45 PM (West Coast time). DirectPay even had a planned service outage at 8:45 PM (West Coast time). Am I just out of luck because I'm now past midnight East Coast time? Or what should I do?
posted by slidell to Work & Money (6 answers total)

Response by poster: Okay weird. When I stopped trying to pay the low-cost way (with a debit card) and switched to the high-fee way (a credit card), it worked. Bizarre, but I guess that's cheaper than failure to file (etc.) penalties.
posted by slidell at 11:08 PM on July 15, 2020

Glad you got it in ontime--sorry it had to be the high-fee way!
No bueno!
posted by calgirl at 11:34 PM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

FWIW the fee for failing to FILE your taxes is higher than the fee for failure to PAY the taxes owed, so if this ever happens again you’re probably better off filing and waiting to pay.
posted by mskyle at 3:38 AM on July 16, 2020 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: I also filed an extension.
posted by slidell at 7:36 AM on July 16, 2020

I don't know how much you paid for the credit card service charge (around 2% probably), but it's possible that the penalties for being one day late would have been less than that - it's all based on how much you owe, but the percentages are not huge for one day. Also, if you have the cash, you can put a check in the mail and it's counted as on-time so long as it is postmarked on the due date.
posted by Mid at 7:55 AM on July 16, 2020

The cheapest CC processor for the IRS charges 1.85 percent. paypal and citi double cash offer 2 percent cashback, so if you're a cardholder, that's actually cheaper than debit.
posted by pwnguin at 12:45 AM on July 26, 2020