"What I probably could have said is "hey, IRS resources won't help you either, sit tight, hopefully we're working on a resolution". "

Exactly.

It's easy to do a drive-by of this community, a critical analysis of what you think you see. Try going to the Top Level of this subforum, and read the topics from the beginning, in March, when the chaos started. Now come back and answer questions every day while you are also here doing your own job and you start to see the magnitude of the dilemma.

All we can do is keep giving the links to updated info provided by the IRS for IRS issues; by the SSA for their issues, etc. And keep in mind that we are doing so from an Intuit Peer Community meant for preparing customer taxes. Not for general public accounting guidance or taxpayer advice.

After all, the IRS gets our tax money to help fund their customer support center(s). That doesn't seem to be working out, though, so why would Intuit's Customers that volunteer here, be responsible for taking up the slack? We Tried. We can't do more than ask them to calm down and follow the only guidance available to all of us.

"We as employees are as restricted by the systems as anyone else and it's incredibly frustrating to encounter an unresolved problem and feel like you're the only one who cares if it's fixed."

Now turn that into: Gee, you paid How Much for the tax preparation programs that are not updated timely, not running on your computer, don't seem to calculate the simple lines that you can compute in your head, won't let you file without throwing a diagnostic that can, in fact, be ignored? Because unlike you, no one is Paying for the time the Volunteers spend trying to be helpful here. We don't work for Intuit unless you see "Intuit" as part of the username.