ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Maryland Comptroller's Office is facing a week-long backlog in processing tax returns and refunds.
On Tuesday Comptroller Brooke Lierman said the agency's internal tax processing system had been offline since March 6.
Restoration was apparently completed on Monday. While the system was offline, the Comptroller's Office received approximately 225,000 individual returns.
"This was not a malicious attack, it was an internal systems error, no data was compromised or lost," said Lierman.
Lierman blamed the outage on the database being out-of-date and in need of modernization.
"Just routine maintenance on our legacy tax processing system, which is decades old and one of the datasets in our database system was full, we had to add more space," said Lierman. "Unfortunately something happened and the system needed to be taken offline so that it could be repaired, and we could process more tax returns."
Lierman said she expects the office to be fully caught up by March 22.
The Comptroller's Office is hoping for a transition to a cloud base platform, to prevent similar outages in the future.
