Half mil file taxes at last minute

Over 900,000 tax returns were filed in the three-day period leading up to the income tax deadline, of which nearly 500,000 were filed on April 1, the tax office says. A spokesperson for the Belastingdienst said, “That’s a lot for one day,” but the single-day record is not known. The Belastingdienst website reportedly crashed numerous times during the busy period. The tax office responded by giving people an extra day to file their declarations to compensate for the site’s downtime. This year, the majority of tax reports were sent in electronically. The online system can handle 20,000 simultaneous attempts to file, according to newspaper AD.