WTF Delaware!?  

So, it’s tax time. Like all responsible business owners out there, I decide it’s time to pay my annual Delaware franchise tax. It’s 2014, and thanks to Al Gore, I can fully expect a hassle-free experience when paying my tax bill at delaware.gov. Maybe not as smooth as Amazon, but that’s understandable.

Got my tax ID and bank info ready - let’s get started. A quick google search for “pay delaware franchise tax online” brings me right to the page I’m looking for (https://corp.delaware.gov/frtax.shtml). Excellent! It’s a little rough on the eyes, but who cares, I can easily find what I’m looking for: “If you would like to pay your taxes online CLICK HERE.”

Except, something seems a bit off. The button to actually pay my tax bill doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, no buttons or links on the site respond at all. I can’t even highlight text. Maybe it’s Chrome. I’ll try Firefox. No luck. The page is a complete brick wall, almost as if someone took a screenshot of it and posted the site as a .jpg file instead of html. Even hovering over the text link, which on a normal page would show me in the bottom of the window where that link is supposed to go - just doesn’t work.

Let’s take a breather. I’ve been building web apps professionally for over 10 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’d actually have to think hard to successfully build a site as unresponsive as this one. I mean where would I even start? Maybe I’d use a series of CSS rules to disable click and highlight on every page element. Or maybe I could overlay a 3000x3000 transparent gif on the page? Maybe a Javscript infinite loop is the answer. Maybe all three strategies can work together in a vexing cocktail of frustration!

I decide to take a look under the hood and open up Chrome Developer Tools to figure out what’s going on. Maybe it’s something I can fix locally and finally get to the payment page. After all no one writes perfect code and we’ve all fallen victim to that rogue bug that somehow made its way into production. Sure enough, my console lights up with errors as soon as I reload the page - 5 uncaught exceptions, a bunch of messages about mixing HTTP/HTTPS, some 404s. Not worth my time.

Maybe I can dig into the source code and find where that link goes. I see it links to paytaxes.shtml, so I manually type that URL into my browser. Sure enough, another completely unresponsive page! But on this page is another fun nugget of information: “This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter Time.”

Ok DELAWARE, you win. I refuse to go down the rabbit hole anymore. What does this imply? Did someone write a program to shutdown the web server every day at 11:45pm? Are you refusing to automatically collect taxes outside of those hours? Or does someone flip a switch every morning at 8am to boot up the servers, then turn them off again at night before going home? It’s so nice of you to give your hard working servers the night off, but I assure you they’ll be just fine.

I hope by now you’ve seen the irony here. Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can’t even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars! That’s how broken our system is.