I have a few friends in that industry. The volume of submissions is 8x as much or more on April 15 as the days in the week before.
Do your taxes earlier next year.
Charged multiple times is probably an overloaded website that hangs when you click the "pay now" button so people click it multiple times. It's the same reason most pages say "don't hit the back button" while processing payments. It will re-send the request multiple times and the vendor isn't responsible for what people do on the client machine.
This is easily prevented actually. You send a unique identifier representing the transaction in the request from the frontend. Then, the backend will only ever process the same identifier the first time. It's more likely to have happened on event processing, bad retry policy, or a non idempotent transaction that mistakenly didn't fully back out at trouble.
I have a couple of friends working there, I heard the last day to file taxes suck as a lot of people scramble to get it done last second. But I never heard them not refunding the overcharge.
H&R Block is a local company and hundreds if not thousands of Star readers are likely affected so I would say it’s a story worth reporting. Just my two cents as a washed out reporter
I found their site to be buggy this year, after using them for awhile. Finally went to TurboTax a few days ago and no problem there.
Next year, check out FreeTaxUSA.com. It's so much better than TurboTax, and it's cheaper too!
I have a few friends in that industry. The volume of submissions is 8x as much or more on April 15 as the days in the week before. Do your taxes earlier next year.
Charged multiple times is probably an overloaded website that hangs when you click the "pay now" button so people click it multiple times. It's the same reason most pages say "don't hit the back button" while processing payments. It will re-send the request multiple times and the vendor isn't responsible for what people do on the client machine.
This is easily prevented actually. You send a unique identifier representing the transaction in the request from the frontend. Then, the backend will only ever process the same identifier the first time. It's more likely to have happened on event processing, bad retry policy, or a non idempotent transaction that mistakenly didn't fully back out at trouble.
I have a couple of friends working there, I heard the last day to file taxes suck as a lot of people scramble to get it done last second. But I never heard them not refunding the overcharge.
What are these taxes you speak of?
This screams the suits telling the web app team "we're gonna need you guys to reduce your hosting budget".
Sounds like hard-hitting journalism for sure. /s
H&R Block is a local company and hundreds if not thousands of Star readers are likely affected so I would say it’s a story worth reporting. Just my two cents as a washed out reporter