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    Emancipation Holiday Causes Computers to Hiccup on Tax Day

    By
    Lisa Vaas
    -
    April 23, 2007
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      It’s not quite another Y2K, but some computers’ failure to take into account the Washington-celebrated Emancipation Day 2007 may throw a monkey wrench into IRA contributions filed from those systems.

      SANS Director Marcus Sachs pointed out the mix up, which affects some mutual fund companies, banks and other financial institutions that provide IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts) in the United States.

      Taxes are usually due April 15. This year, that date fell on a Sunday, which pushed the deadline to Monday, April 16. April 16, however, was Emancipation Day, which has been celebrated as a public holiday in the District of Columbia since Mayor Anthony Williams in 2005 signed legislation to that effect. The victory can be traced back to the work of Loretta Carter-Hanes, a D.C. local and literacy volunteer who spent years of research and lobbying to make sure the day was commemorated.

      That made the new deadline April 17. Some computers and many printed tax forms weren’t changed to accommodate the new date, however.

      As SANS reports it, the customers of some banks and mutual fund companies who used a Web interface to make an IRA contribution were allowed to backdate the contribution, being permitted as they were to select 2006 for the year in which a deposit should be credited on that date. The back-end systems, however, were programmed to only allow 2007 contributions after midnight of the night before.

      Making a 2006 contribution on Tuesday with a Web portal or other online service means a taxpayer could be credited for 2007, instead of 2006.

      Emancipation Day is celebrated in many former slave-holding regions of the world to mark the day when they were freed. In the United States, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of slaves in the District of Columbia on April 16, 1862. His action freed some 3,100 slaves nine months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation—the precursor to slave emancipation throughout the United States.

      As Wikipedia tells it, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act “represents the only example of compensation by the federal government to former owners of emancipated slaves.”

      The holiday will fall this way in the calendar again in April 2012. “Let’s see if the computers get the word,” Sachs said.

      Lisa Vaas
      Lisa Vaas is News Editor/Operations for eWEEK.com and also serves as editor of the Database topic center. Since 1995, she has also been a Webcast news show anchorperson and a reporter covering the IT industry. She has focused on customer relationship management technology, IT salaries and careers, effects of the H1-B visa on the technology workforce, wireless technology, security, and, most recently, databases and the technologies that touch upon them. Her articles have appeared in eWEEK's print edition, on eWEEK.com, and in the startup IT magazine PC Connection. Prior to becoming a journalist, Vaas experienced an array of eye-opening careers, including driving a cab in Boston, photographing cranky babies in shopping malls, selling cameras, typography and computer training. She stopped a hair short of finishing an M.A. in English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She earned a B.S. in Communications from Emerson College. She runs two open-mic reading series in Boston and currently keeps bees in her home in Mashpee, Mass.
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