H&R Block Software Glitch Delays Refunds for More Than 600,000 People

Well this is no fun.  Apparently a glitch in H&R Block tax preparation software caused more than 600,000 tax returns to be filed incorrectly, which means refunds are going to be delayed for those people by as much as six weeks according to Market Watch.

H&R Block confirmed that their software didn't fill out a mandatory field on Form 8863 which is used to claim educational credits. The whole problem came up because the IRS now requires that an "N" be entered in a field to indicate "No," where before it had been okay to just leave it blank.

The IRS said this mistake is affecting about 10 percent of the tax returns it's received that have Form 8863, and now that they're aware of the systematic error, they will be able to keep processing the returns. However, affected taxpayers will still face delays because of the extra steps needed to correct the error.

This glitch affects mostly college students who filed form 8863 for education credits from February 14^th through February 22^nd.  To make matters worse, a lot of those students are worried the delay will affect their application for college financial aid which is really, really important!