hrblock.com Site Back Up, but Some Data Lost

hrblock.com's woes continue.

The online tax-preparation portion of the site came back online Monday after a five-day outage, says Linda McDougall, H&R Block's (HRB) vice president of communications. But some of the taxpayers' data have been lost.

Any data entered into the site's online forms between 8 p.m. EST on Feb. 11 and 11 a.m. on Feb. 14 were "taken offline," according to hrblock.com's Web site. Company officials say they don't know how many customers were affected.

Data entered before the problem began on Feb. 11 have been saved and are still available to customers.

Company officials shut down the site on Feb. 16 when they discovered that some customers' data were appearing in the wrong customers' files. About 50 customers were affected.

Last week's outage was the second since the site launched on Jan. 21. The first outage in early February, which lasted for several days, was blamed on an overwhelming amount of traffic.

Information entered during the "affected period" from Feb. 11 to Feb. 14 -- including username and password -- was removed from the site. So anyone returning to the site last weekend would have had to start from scratch.

Share online tax-prep questions on the E-Filing Forum board

hrblock.com has posted instructions on its site for customers affected by the outage.

E-filings Are up

More than 60% of the 23.5 million tax returns received by the Internal Revenue Service as of Feb. 11 were electronically filed, up 10% from the year-ago period.

Most important, the number of individual taxpayers who filed electronically has increased. (Tax professionals account for the vast majority of returns filed electronically.) The number of individual e-filers has reached 1.24 million. That's already more than half of the 2.5 million returns filed electronically by individuals all of last year.

Intuit's TurboTax has the lion's share of the market, accounting for more than 83% of returns e-filed by individuals, according to Intuit's spokeswoman, Jennifer Roberts.

Newcomer H.D. Vest (HDVS) accounts for only 155,000 of those returns even though its service is free while the TurboTax Web site charges $9.95 for federal returns.

But reader Mark Kizer gave the H.D. Vest site his vote of confidence: "I used the Web site and had a great experience. I verified the return with another software and am pleased with the accuracy of the return. FYI: I was so pleased I purchased 100 shares of H.D. Vest."

(As an aside: His email is dated Feb. 8. Assuming he bought the stock around that day, he's lost 15% since. It has dropped from 10 to 8 1/2 over the last few weeks.)

If you have an other online tax-preparation comments, be sure to send them on to [e-mail] and we'll share them with our readers.

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