PTIN Application

[Gary2]

Can you tell what business could release such a program with so many flaws that the person responsible would not be fired?.

How can any one be free to do this without penalty?

Are we still in America?

Putting my SQA hat on, you'd be surprised. Software companies don't like to spend money on SQA unless they can see an effect on the bottom line. Banks and brokerages spend the money - a minute of downtime can cost a fortune. Medical device companies spend it - a single bug during FDA trials forces them to fix the problem and then start the trial over again from the beginning.

But web sites, other than the big names, often don't, though they're getting better. There have been plenty of incidents of major web sites being brought down due to traffic - either news sites because of some event, or commercial sites because of new product announcements. I know of one site, dealing in entertainment software, that had a bug that kept reappearing for a year (though it's gone now). They're struggling, but still around. There's a ton of apps for the iPhone, etc., some amateur, some semi-pro, some pro, with obvious bugs.

In this case, I'm not sure whether it's the IRS or the third party that's responsible, but given the time constraints and number of people, it actually makes sense to release it at this state. A few thousand users will find the important bugs more quickly and much more cheaply than proper SQA. Given their schedule, and especially if it went to the lowest bidder, they couldn't have hired enough SQA and testing people to find all these bugs and still get it out on the original date.