'Feels spoofed': Tax pros stunned as IRS site riddled with errors days before tax deadline

The IRS's website contains so many errors that one tax professional quipped, "This is feeling like the website is spoofed and your payments will go straight to Russia,” according to new reporting from Forbes.

"It would be funny if it weren’t true," wrote Kelly Phillips Erb, senior writer with the publication.

Erb wrote that the typos and errors were brought to her attention on Thursday, and she listed some of the more egregious mistakes in her article.

For one, taxpayers who file their extension request by the April 15 deadline get a full six months to file their return—but they must pay what they owe by the original deadline. That's not the message taxpayers have been getting recently. The IRS website suggests that taxpayers have more time to pay. The website message reads, "'Your payment is due on April 22, 2025, regradless of filing for an extension.' (Yes, the 'regradless' typo is on the IRS site, too)."

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One tax professional told her that the "installment agreement option" that allows taxpayers to make payments over five years was only showing a five-month timeframe. Another told her that the link to search for charities was wiped off the home page.

Erb wrote that "errors appear in other spots on the website, too, including misidentifying the amended tax form as Form 104X (it's Form 1040X) that was recently 'filled' instead of 'filed.'” In addition, forms from tax years 2022 and 2023 are showing up as "now being processed," even though that ship sailed a while ago.

Although it wasn't clear if the changes were made by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, Musk posted to X on Wednesday that the team had made at least one "fix" to the website.

Musk wrote, "The 'log in' button was not in the top right on the navbar like it is on most websites. It was weirdly placed in the middle of the page below the fold. An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21... 103 days from now. This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes. See before/after pictures below. There are great people at the IRS, who are simply being strangled by bureaucracy.”

Erb wrote that she did not receive an answer to her request for more information.

Read the Forbes article here.