Intuit, the makers of TurboTax have halted transmission of state e-filing tax returns on concerns over fraud.
UPDATE: Intuit announced that it had began processing tax returns again at 6 pm ET on 2/6/2015 after a temporary shutdown that started Thursday. The company said that their investigation is ongoing, and in the meantime it has beefed up its security technology to protect customers against ID theft.
Federal returns being processed and E-filed via TurboTax, have more stringent fraud controls, and were unaffected by the outage.
In an announcement made early (on 2/6/2015) Brad Smith, Intuit's president and chief executive, said in a press release, "We understand the role we play in this important industry issue and continuously monitor our systems in search of suspicious activity. We've identified specific patterns of behavior where fraud is more likely to occur. We're working with the states to share that information and remedy the situation quickly. We will continue to engage them on an ongoing basis in an effort to stop fraud before it gets started."
Intuit said that it was working with state agencies to address the issue. On Thursday the Minnesota Department of Revenue said that they would no longer accept tax returns submitted through Intuit's TurboTax program because it had notice potential fraud. At that time they were still accepting tax returns prepared from other Intuit products such as Intuit Tax Online, ProSeries and Lacerte.
Intuit said that they did not believe its systems had been compromised but they were pausing state return e-filings as a "precautionary step".
Note: This article has had several changes and updates since its' first publication.