IRS extends tax filing deadline following attack on Wolters Kluwer CCH cloud accounting service

The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has approved a seven-day extension for filings that were affected by the downtime last week of Wolters Kluwer’s CCH accounting service, following the discovery of malware.

In a customer advisory posted on its website, Wolters Kluwer says affected parties now have until May 22 to file.

The IRS has approved extensions for tax return types 990, 1120 and 1065 filings that were impacted by the May 6 service interruption of Wolters Kluwer CCH software. Impacted filers now have until May 22, 2019, a 7-day extension, to file. As long as the filing is done on or before the extension date, it will not be considered late by the IRS and, consequently all related penalties and interest will be waived. We notified customers of this extension on Friday, May 10.

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The outage is likely to have had an impact on some big companies. According to Wolters Kluwer, it counts 93% of Fortune 500 companies amonhgst its customers.

Wolters Kluwer says that it has been restoring access to its various online services, including CCH SureTax and CCH Axcess, since May 7, and has re-emphasised that it has “seen no evidence” that customer data has been compromised.

Concerned customers can call Wolters Kluwer’s dedicated support hotline on (800) 930-1753.

The company says that the investigation into exactly what happened, and how, continues… Let’s hope they eventually share more details so other companies can learn lessons from this potentially very serious security breach.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.