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Performance Tracking  > 2014 Tax Websites  > Introduction

WebSitePulse 2014 Tax Performance and Uptime Report


Tax season is near and it might be a good idea for you to choose a tax return website to file your taxes.

The Web is now flooded by warnings on how people must beware of fraudsters stealing tax refunds. With every tax season, thieves are becoming more creative in collecting your refund, so you should stay alert the whole time. A common scam now is thieves stealing your social security number and then filing tax return under your name. This means that you should be watching out for identity theft as well. And let’s not forget the fraudulent websites which claim to be legitimate tax return websites as well.

Tax fraud, however, is not the only issue you can come across while filling out tax forms online. If the tax refund website is down or loads slowly, you may lose the information you have already filled out, or may not be able to finish the registration on time.

As usual, we have decided to monitor 12 of the most popular tax refund websites during the whole tax season – from April 4th until April 15th, and report their daily performance and availability. Needless to say, the higher the uptime and lower the response time, the better the chances for these websites to have more loyal clients in return.

See details of the monitoring process below.

Performance Reports

The most important metrics for the availability and reliability of any e-process are website response time and website uptime, which is why WebSitePulse performance reports focus on those two.

The reports reflect not only the tax websites’ home pages performance, but any web transaction process as well. To be specific, measurements of e-transactions are made every 15 minutes, from 3 different monitoring locations in the U.S. Also, to ensure the accuracy of the monitoring recordings, we use false alarm prevention system and error verification controls. The tax-return websites response and uptime reports will be published after April 4rd, 2014, where you can find information on uptime, performance and availability.