In Nevada (where I pay my corporate taxes) it was claimed that hours restrictions were mandated by law ("No part of the office can be open outside of the following hours" kind of thing) I have yet to find the statute though that says that. I agree it is a very weird thing.
Not that this is a good reason, but one possibility is that the backend could require human interaction. Perhaps when the form gets submitted it gets automatically sent to a printer where a person manually files it. I could see a process like that showing up on http://thedailywtf.com ...
It's pretty common when you've got a mainframe-type system that needs to do a bunch of batch processing and report generation. It's an excellent way to ensure that no data will be altered while the reports are running.
The Canada Revenue Agency's web apps are closed overnight too (albeit only for 3 hours). My understanding from talking to one of their sysadmins is that they use this time to perform backups and software upgrades because it's less error-prone than trying to do those "live".
My only guess is a batch job that really really doesn't want data changing out from under it (and the devs were too lazy to batch up the next days changes to be submitted post-job).
I think you have it. 11:45PM sounds suspiciously like the batch job kicks off at midnight and should be done by opening of business the next day. I figure if it looks like it will go over 8AM then they have to kill it because the office staff is going to change data regardless of what IT wants.
The true blood boiler is when the system finally collapses and IT gets hit with the "why didn't you fix this before it collapsed"-lecture from the same folks who wouldn't give you the budget to fix it in the first place.
This is generally followed by the hiring of some consulting firm to propose the solution you wanted budget for at a fair multiple of the original budget. They, after all, are consultants and you are a peon.
"I hope by now you’ve seen the irony here. Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can’t even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars! That’s how broken our system is."
Our system is so broken that most new corporations are formed in a company with _no_ space available for your business or for you to live, only a person who sits and answers a phone for a few thousand or hundred thousand companies to prove an 'office location' or whatever wording.
Delaware doesn't care because they get some taxes, what you'd really call a payoff for being a tax protector.
There were pretty heinous problems with the situation at hand before OP opened his web browser.
Yes, as I write this, people are getting stabbed, shot, raped, killed by cancer, and mangled in car wrecks. And that's way worse than having to hassle with a broken web site.
But there are people reading this board who can actually build functional web sites, and who are appalled that the government managed to mess up so badly. That's the point.
The entitled have trouble with reading comprehension. The site was explicitly closed during certain hours, sadly probably because the data is verified by hand. He is whining that he doesn't like the hours.
No, that was just a side effect of digging into an issue with the site that was preventing me from paying a tax. I didn't even know about that odd schedule.
Competition among states that want business is a good thing at the core though.
Delaware and Nevada want to attract business so they have better prices. Regulation and law allow it, and this is healthy to have states competing for business.
If this competition did not exist state licenses and taxes would be like paying for broadband from one provider and probably thousands a year to license instead of $300 and taxes would be immense.
Small business especially already pays higher taxes so really any advantage given to small business really helps the economy as a whole even if that means lower taxes by registering in another state. The only way to fight the market is with regulation or competition, the latter always means cheaper prices and will allow more small business.
Killing it makes the site responsive. No idea what it's there for. I'm guessing that it should be moved by JS, but the JS is failing. There's a lot of these:
Uncaught TypeError: Property '$' of object [object Object] is not a function
Looks like jQuery isn't getting loaded, but that's probably because of:
[blocked] The page at 'https://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran insecure content from 'http://www.delaware.gov/CLF2012/js/jquery-1.5.1.min.js': this content should also be loaded over HTTPS.
So, yeah, no jQuery, no script, defunct page. The problems seem to be rooted in the fact that jQuery didn't load due to it being sent over HTTP, and not HTTPS; indeed, loading the page on HTTP causes things to appear to work.
Just don't use any security, and everything will work just fine. :-) This problem seems to cover the entirety of corp.delaware.gov, too.
Also, the 404's the article mentions,
GET https://corp.delaware.gov/undefined?1394573701086 404 (Not Found)
I doubt that the URL is supposed to have "undefined", but rather that JS has stabbed yet another dev in the back.
He's been building web apps professionally for over 10 years, and he didn't think to right click somewhere (anywhere) and "Inspect Element"? That's the first thing I did on that page.
EDIT: That came off a bit more snarky (snarkier?) than I meant. To the OP: If you inspect the element, you can then delete it with the backspace/delete key to get to the link that you need, which ultimately leads to a separate subdomain that doesn't seem to exhibit this problem: https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF
Don't be too quick to write the site off as "utterly dysfunctional". Any one of us could have made a similar mistake, and once you get past that glaring bug (which only appears on pages served over SSL), it's not bad for a state government site.
> He's been building web apps professionally for over 10 years, and he didn't think to right click somewhere (anywhere) and "Inspect Element"? That's the first thing I did on that page.
That's odd too, it was basically my first thought to inspect the element which used this pointless div and then tried deleting it. Total time spent: 15 seconds, less than reading this rant.
(This is actually a habit I formed by getting rid of huge overlay ads that cover the page or try to force me to log in. No sir, I'll just have this node removed, thank you very much)
Just got bit by Delaware's corporate name-check service. It only runs during EST business hours. I just want to query a database to see if a name is already taken, thank you..
They don't allow late march filing on the site, some genius thought that instead of showing a pop-up or error message he just freezes the page. Same behavior noticed when we tried filing during off hours.
> “This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter Time.”
I really hope the "Easter [sic] Time" is from the original site, not a typo in the blog.
The only other business I've seen do this is B&H[0], which refuses to accept online orders during the Sabbath, as well as during several other Jewish holidays (such as the first and last days of Passover).
The only other business I've seen do this was my previous landlord[1]. They used to let me pay my rent online. However, their system only let you pay during "standard business hours", completely negating (for me) the convenience of an online payment - I like to take care of my bills after-hours at home, not at work, thank you very much.
It's quite common in Japan for ATMs to only operate during business hours. The Japanese are world-class experts at implementing technology in ways that completely negate its core value.
That's half of the story. The other half is the ATM is not just refusing to operate, it's behind closed doors to protect it from potential aggressions. Japanese bank are sharply close to their core values (keep the money).
I am aware that this was true in the past (a countryside ATM booth tried to lock me in at 6:00PM 11 years ago) but can you list any recent examples of this (bank names, ATM locations)?
I was there in January this year and did not encounter this at all. The worst was an "after hours" fee of a few hundred yen at a Mitsubishi UFJ foyer ATM (after 10:00 PM IIRC).
That's a typo (I had to actually type out the line word by word instead of copying and pasting because highlighting the text wouldn't work for reasons stated in the post :)
I'm a grad student at Tufts, and our online course registration app does this (called "SIS"). You can only register for classes during some time period: 8am to 6pm, I think. It's crazy.
Tufts recently hired a huge team to "fix" SIS. It's now called iSIS and you can tell it's still using SIS underneath. (The HTML markup returned is the exact same as before, but it's dressed up a little nicer.)
I was at Worcester State before Tufts, and part of their registration had to be done via paper (in person at the registrar). It was almost as convenient as these online systems... (Assuming I was on campus anyway.)
University of Michigan's student business site (registering classes, bills, transcripts, etc.) is closed from 4am - 6am every day and 11pm Saturday - 7:30am Sunday.
I hit this period several times without knowing what was wrong. The warning isn't very obvious.
When I went to Queen's University, the web app for course registration, viewing your marks and other related tasks was rumoured to be a wrapper around a telnet interface. I never got confirmation, but the following evidence was enough for me:
- Fixed number of columns/rows output on a given page and rendered in a fixed-width font so things would align.
- The need to navigate through "pages" of information that were far smaller than what a browser could handle, but would make sense in a terminal window.
- A form-driven interface with buttons for separate actions; the buttons seemingly would map to certain keypresses in a terminal interface.
I'm guessing the original computer-based system provided a telnet interface in the '90s but this was deemed insecure/out of date as the years went by. Not wanting to significantly change the architecture, a web wrapper must have been deemed the best option.
Although when supplying information to an organisation which has such as poor approach to running its computer systems, you may as well assume you are making it public anyway.
Is this the franchise tax that depends on the assets of the company? The one where the registered agents routinely send estimated payments invoices with assumptions far in excess of the actual taxes?
Excuse my tinfoil hattery, but I have to wonder whether the accuracy of payments has something to do with the lack of website usability.
There are two ways to calculate your Delaware taxes (assuming registered as a C-Corp) - the authorized shares method and the assumed par value method. The online annual filing form makes this quite easy to calculate. Unless you are generating huge revenue then par value is the way to go.
> “This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter[n] Time.”
We're not used to sites like Amazon being shut down during nighttime hours, but I've come across it before for government sites. For example, when I filed a corporation with the IRS, after I answered a few pages, the site said I should come back during work hours. They probably have a person at the other end who handles the forms...
Pretty sure the root cause is the blend of http/https sources. Chrome and perhaps other browsers helpfully block the http content some of which is probably needed for the webpage to function.
In Chrome you click the shield icon next to the bookmarks star in the address bar. I believe the page will then reload showing the http content which will usually fix the issue.
I say "helpful" un-ironically above because the http content can compromise whatever is on the page.
The OP is of course right that the developer of this page is dangerously incompetent.
do you a system to transact automatically with state funds? and what about when it gets hacked and people ask why no one was paying attention? people sit and approve transactions. your taxes pay government employees, not robots.
Most of these were paid for long ago in the age of Internet Explorer, I bet it works fine in that. Hopefully gov't contracts now focus on open technologies and have to support more browsers now but all of them are broken.
I use AZ and Nevada, Nevada was horrid but got a little better, still on par with insurance sites or offshored services. These types of systems would never survive if they didn't collude a useful or required service behind them.
The worst services I have to deal with are paying my state taxes (EFTPS for federal isn't too bad) and insurance websites for healthcare. The healthcare.gov site, even though it launched bad, actually looks good and has some usability, relative to the insurance/tax/govt sites of the same caliber.
>"Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can’t even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars!"
Oh wow, a "My tax dollars!" complaint in the middle of a "My tax dodge is inconvenient!" complaint with a little "Thanks, Obama!" thrown in for good measure.
I wasn't aware this was a tax dodge. My attorney just told me Delaware is a good place to form an LLC because of favorable laws to Internet businesses. Considering I've been paying close to 45%+ in federal+state+city taxes I'd say this is a pretty poor dodge.
Also, I am criticizing the $200 million spent on healthcare.gov, not Obamacare itself, or Obama.
You forgot to mention that Obama runs the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, that the Legislative Branch creates tax laws and passed the enabling legislation for ObamaCare and that Delaware is a state and the author's payment has nothing to do with the Federal Government at all.
What should one expect from a person so out of touch with the impact of health care access on the lives of ordinary Americans that they would carry on about how improved access is a social ill? The best I can say about the article is that rather than two piles. a great deal of ignorance and foolishness has been gathered in one place.
>"Oh wow, a "My tax dollars!" complaint in the middle of a "My tax dodge is inconvenient!" complaint with a little "Thanks, Obama!" thrown in for good measure."
Delawares taxes are competitive but not actually the lowest. The following is a succinct explanation from a 3 second Google search on the issue.
"There are two major reasons for Delaware's dominance of the corporate incorporation business. One reason is the bi-partisan political consensus in Delaware to keep the Delaware corporation statute modern and up-to-date, and to rely on Delaware's corporate law specialists for advice in how to do this. As a result, law students at every law school in the United States study the Delaware corporation statute and the decisions of Delaware courts interpreting that law."
"The other major reason corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware is the quality of Delaware courts and judges. Delaware has a special court, the Court of Chancery, to rule on corporate law disputes without juries. Corporate cases do not get stuck on dockets behind the multitude of non-corporate cases. Instead, Delaware corporations can expect their legal disputes to be addressed promptly and expertly by judges who specialize in corporate law."
What is interesting is though the state has an incredibly fast evolving legal ecosystem, it has obviously not maintained the same technological policies.
A third major reason is fashion. People want to incorporate, and they look and see a bunch of major corporations are incorporated in Delaware even though they don't have any serious business connection with Delaware other than being incorporated there, and so they think it is a good idea for them to incorporate their small local business in far off Delaware just like the giant public companies do. (Or rather, usually do...Microsoft reincorporated back to Washington after a few years in Delaware).
A fourth reason is that incorporation in your home state can be complicated; for instance, in NY, it (IIRC) involves running newspaper ads. If you're not going to incorporate in your home state, Delaware is a sane default choice.
A fifth reason is that it's extremely easy to incorporate in Delaware; it's the Internet's default choice, too.
"Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars"
Of course the cliche "shitty little photo sharing startup" runs perfectly all the time 24x7 no down time no code errors.
How about checking back in a day and seeing if the problem has been fixed at least?
So a site isn't working. Happens quite frequently, right? Happened to me trying to access HN last week and a few times before. Happens when I am trying to get to netflix occasionally.
Doesn't mean they aren't aware or aren't working on it. Nice for the OP to try and pile on them of course as if it's all an issue of the government screwing up.
Actually I tried paying yesterday. Today it still wasn't fixed. I'd bet tomorrow it still won't be fixed. You'd think at the height of tax season this would be a priority for whoever is responsible for the site.
88 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadhttp://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...
> Our new hours of operation [for the application] are Monday through Friday 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.
It's pretty common when you've got a mainframe-type system that needs to do a bunch of batch processing and report generation. It's an excellent way to ensure that no data will be altered while the reports are running.
You can also find some documentation speaking about Netscape.
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ntcs/scrty_tls-eng.html
W. T. F.
Why yes, I have been in THAT meeting, just not in Delaware.
This is generally followed by the hiring of some consulting firm to propose the solution you wanted budget for at a fair multiple of the original budget. They, after all, are consultants and you are a peon.
They must have linked a .js that wasn't on a https.
Their problem is the div#forceDOMredraw which appears over everything. Good times. Remove that node and the page works again.
"I hope by now you’ve seen the irony here. Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can’t even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars! That’s how broken our system is."
Our system is so broken that most new corporations are formed in a company with _no_ space available for your business or for you to live, only a person who sits and answers a phone for a few thousand or hundred thousand companies to prove an 'office location' or whatever wording.
Delaware doesn't care because they get some taxes, what you'd really call a payoff for being a tax protector.
There were pretty heinous problems with the situation at hand before OP opened his web browser.
That I can choose at which 'location' I incorporate for something that is immaterial?
Yes, as I write this, people are getting stabbed, shot, raped, killed by cancer, and mangled in car wrecks. And that's way worse than having to hassle with a broken web site.
But there are people reading this board who can actually build functional web sites, and who are appalled that the government managed to mess up so badly. That's the point.
Delaware and Nevada want to attract business so they have better prices. Regulation and law allow it, and this is healthy to have states competing for business.
If this competition did not exist state licenses and taxes would be like paying for broadband from one provider and probably thousands a year to license instead of $300 and taxes would be immense.
Small business especially already pays higher taxes so really any advantage given to small business really helps the economy as a whole even if that means lower taxes by registering in another state. The only way to fight the market is with regulation or competition, the latter always means cheaper prices and will allow more small business.
Killing it makes the site responsive. No idea what it's there for. I'm guessing that it should be moved by JS, but the JS is failing. There's a lot of these:
Looks like jQuery isn't getting loaded, but that's probably because of: So, yeah, no jQuery, no script, defunct page. The problems seem to be rooted in the fact that jQuery didn't load due to it being sent over HTTP, and not HTTPS; indeed, loading the page on HTTP causes things to appear to work.Just don't use any security, and everything will work just fine. :-) This problem seems to cover the entirety of corp.delaware.gov, too.
Also, the 404's the article mentions,
I doubt that the URL is supposed to have "undefined", but rather that JS has stabbed yet another dev in the back.EDIT: That came off a bit more snarky (snarkier?) than I meant. To the OP: If you inspect the element, you can then delete it with the backspace/delete key to get to the link that you need, which ultimately leads to a separate subdomain that doesn't seem to exhibit this problem: https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF
Don't be too quick to write the site off as "utterly dysfunctional". Any one of us could have made a similar mistake, and once you get past that glaring bug (which only appears on pages served over SSL), it's not bad for a state government site.
Perhaps you or someone else could get in touch with them to explain the issue? http://corp.delaware.gov/contact.shtml
That's odd too, it was basically my first thought to inspect the element which used this pointless div and then tried deleting it. Total time spent: 15 seconds, less than reading this rant.
(This is actually a habit I formed by getting rid of huge overlay ads that cover the page or try to force me to log in. No sir, I'll just have this node removed, thank you very much)
From the PDF:
<div id="forceDOMredraw">: A div that forces the browser to redraw the content if it is displayed incorrectly.
Easter is on the 20th of April this year. You will miss the boat completely!
I really hope the "Easter [sic] Time" is from the original site, not a typo in the blog.
The only other business I've seen do this is B&H[0], which refuses to accept online orders during the Sabbath, as well as during several other Jewish holidays (such as the first and last days of Passover).
The only other business I've seen do this was my previous landlord[1]. They used to let me pay my rent online. However, their system only let you pay during "standard business hours", completely negating (for me) the convenience of an online payment - I like to take care of my bills after-hours at home, not at work, thank you very much.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26H
[1] Unlike B&H, the management company was not run by Hasidim.
I was there in January this year and did not encounter this at all. The worst was an "after hours" fee of a few hundred yen at a Mitsubishi UFJ foyer ATM (after 10:00 PM IIRC).
Tufts recently hired a huge team to "fix" SIS. It's now called iSIS and you can tell it's still using SIS underneath. (The HTML markup returned is the exact same as before, but it's dressed up a little nicer.)
Nuts.
I was at Worcester State before Tufts, and part of their registration had to be done via paper (in person at the registrar). It was almost as convenient as these online systems... (Assuming I was on campus anyway.)
I hit this period several times without knowing what was wrong. The warning isn't very obvious.
- Fixed number of columns/rows output on a given page and rendered in a fixed-width font so things would align.
- The need to navigate through "pages" of information that were far smaller than what a browser could handle, but would make sense in a terminal window.
- A form-driven interface with buttons for separate actions; the buttons seemingly would map to certain keypresses in a terminal interface.
I'm guessing the original computer-based system provided a telnet interface in the '90s but this was deemed insecure/out of date as the years went by. Not wanting to significantly change the architecture, a web wrapper must have been deemed the best option.
Excuse my tinfoil hattery, but I have to wonder whether the accuracy of payments has something to do with the lack of website usability.
We're not used to sites like Amazon being shut down during nighttime hours, but I've come across it before for government sites. For example, when I filed a corporation with the IRS, after I answered a few pages, the site said I should come back during work hours. They probably have a person at the other end who handles the forms...
In Chrome you click the shield icon next to the bookmarks star in the address bar. I believe the page will then reload showing the http content which will usually fix the issue.
I say "helpful" un-ironically above because the http content can compromise whatever is on the page.
The OP is of course right that the developer of this page is dangerously incompetent.
do you a system to transact automatically with state funds? and what about when it gets hacked and people ask why no one was paying attention? people sit and approve transactions. your taxes pay government employees, not robots.
you're an idiot.
I use AZ and Nevada, Nevada was horrid but got a little better, still on par with insurance sites or offshored services. These types of systems would never survive if they didn't collude a useful or required service behind them.
The worst services I have to deal with are paying my state taxes (EFTPS for federal isn't too bad) and insurance websites for healthcare. The healthcare.gov site, even though it launched bad, actually looks good and has some usability, relative to the insurance/tax/govt sites of the same caliber.
Oh wow, a "My tax dollars!" complaint in the middle of a "My tax dodge is inconvenient!" complaint with a little "Thanks, Obama!" thrown in for good measure.
Also, I am criticizing the $200 million spent on healthcare.gov, not Obamacare itself, or Obama.
What should one expect from a person so out of touch with the impact of health care access on the lives of ordinary Americans that they would carry on about how improved access is a social ill? The best I can say about the article is that rather than two piles. a great deal of ignorance and foolishness has been gathered in one place.
Delawares taxes are competitive but not actually the lowest. The following is a succinct explanation from a 3 second Google search on the issue.
"There are two major reasons for Delaware's dominance of the corporate incorporation business. One reason is the bi-partisan political consensus in Delaware to keep the Delaware corporation statute modern and up-to-date, and to rely on Delaware's corporate law specialists for advice in how to do this. As a result, law students at every law school in the United States study the Delaware corporation statute and the decisions of Delaware courts interpreting that law."
"The other major reason corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware is the quality of Delaware courts and judges. Delaware has a special court, the Court of Chancery, to rule on corporate law disputes without juries. Corporate cases do not get stuck on dockets behind the multitude of non-corporate cases. Instead, Delaware corporations can expect their legal disputes to be addressed promptly and expertly by judges who specialize in corporate law."
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/brandywine-to-broad...
A fifth reason is that it's extremely easy to incorporate in Delaware; it's the Internet's default choice, too.
Of course the cliche "shitty little photo sharing startup" runs perfectly all the time 24x7 no down time no code errors.
How about checking back in a day and seeing if the problem has been fixed at least?
So a site isn't working. Happens quite frequently, right? Happened to me trying to access HN last week and a few times before. Happens when I am trying to get to netflix occasionally.
Doesn't mean they aren't aware or aren't working on it. Nice for the OP to try and pile on them of course as if it's all an issue of the government screwing up.