Form 990-N -- when available?

It's been intermitent for longer than two weeks. A friend noticed it in early January, and I was having trouble with some of their tools during parts of December.

Last August, IRS announced a new authentication platform. For the 990-N, your old credentials should still work, but if they don't, you'll be required to create an ID.me account to identify yourself.

I'm guessing this is what broke.

I don't think I used the new authentication platorm when I filed 990-N for an organization with a June year end. I probably filed in July.

The deadline is the same as the 990, May 15 or the 15 day of the fifth month after close of non-calendar year fiscal year. I've filed them really late once or twice, during the 10th or 11th month. They still get accepted. Just ask your treasurer to check on it every so often and to have a little patience.

Who cares when IRS receives it. This is why God invented certified mail. In my opinion, that's a superior method for establishing timeliness than an electronic receipt.

I'm not advising you to file a 990 or 990-EZ, which is overkill for a small tax-exempt organization with gross receipts that are normally $50,000 or less.

According to Adam H. Kerman snipped-for-privacy@chinet.com:

Agreed. That's what I'm doing for my tiny nonprofit.

The point of 990-N is at least as much to make life easier for the IRS as it is for non-profits. The IRS does not want a flurry of paper forms from tiny organizations. Just wait. In the unlikely event that the 990-N system isn't fixed by May, they're much more likely to tell people to wait than to send paper.

The penalty for late filing of a 990 is basically nothing. After a few years, the IRS will notice and write you a letter reminding you that if you don't catch up, they will cancel your exempt status. Even then, you file your late 990s, and you're all set. I look at a fair number of 990s and I see late filed ones all the time, even for pretty big organizations.

Note that you aren't yet being forced to identify yourself with ID.me yet and can use your old credentials.

Don't be shocked if it goes down again in a few days.

In general the IRS doesn't charge a penalty if you had good cause to do whatever incurred the penalty. Their website not accepting the

I clicked on all three of the sign-in buttons, and they all gave me the same error page.

But, if I start at the IRS home page, click "Sign in to your account", and a similar button on the next page, it arrives at what looks like the same page. Now signing in with ID.me or my old IRS login works, but it puts me in my personal account.

So then I went back to the 990-N page, clicked submit Form 990-N, and whaddaya know, it logs me in to a page that lets me set up for 990-N. But when I try to add my org's EIN, I get an error page.

I think I'll wait.

There is no penalty for late filing 990-N, which is electronic notice and not a tax return. There are late-filing penalties for 990 and 990-EZ but one never hears of enforcement.

This all goes back to the Pension Protection Act of 2006. Someone in Congress (probably John McCain) thought it was a terrible thing that IRS maintained names of exempt organizations in the Business Master File and not having any idea if they were still in business. The act imposed a requirement upon tiny exempt organzations to file an annual notice beginning in 2008. The threshold was originally was $25,000 or less in gross receipts. The was raised to $50,000 or less. Above that, the entity was required to file 990 or 990-EZ, which are tax returns.

Fail to give required annual notice or file tax returns for three years in a row, IRS puts the organization on the automatic revocation list. If recognition was obtained by determination letter, the determination letter is no longer in force.

None of this applies to churches, which do not have an annual obligation to file a tax return or give notice.

Thanks to everyone for your replies, especially to those who experimented and reported your results.

The TL;DR seems to be "wait a while and try again. Even if you don't file till after the mid-May deadline, there's effectively no penalty."

I've passed all your comments, and mu summary, to our treasurer.