The site will be placed in maintenance on Thursday, December 5th to release the below software update. Majority of items scheduled in this deploy are back-end items, however, one user facing item will be the new Health Insurance flow for 2019.

HEALTH INSURANCE

• Update the Health Insurance flow for 2019
  • Remove calculation of Shared Responsibility Payment
  • Removing non-applicable pages
    • Coverage exemptions
    • Calculation of Affordability Exemption and related items
    • Months of coverage for each Household member
  • Keeping pages specific to needed 1095-A information, if applicable

New 2019 Flow

• Scenario 1
  • 1st Question – “Did you purchase Health Insurance via Healthcare.gov or a State Marketplace?”
    • If No, Health Insurance menu is complete.
• Scenario 2
  • 1st Question – “Did you purchase Health Insurance via Healthcare.gov or a State Marketplace?”
    • If Yes, continue to “Household Members” page > Provide 1095-A(s) details > Review “Household Income” page (displays if dependent or additional household members are present and have a filing requirement) > Health Insurance menu is complete.

*Click here to download a PDF of our Cumulative Release Notes & Program Enhancements.

The Alimony Paid (Adjustment) and Alimony Received (Income) menus have been updated to account for the 2019 updates to Schedule 1 to capture the “Date of original divorce or separation agreement” shown below. However, if entries existed in either menu prior to yesterday’s update, impacted returns may render an error when attempting to access the return from Client List. This is because the program is trying to perform a calculation when not all required entries are available (i.e. missing the date of divorce or separation agreement). We have opened Issue 3940 to correct this issue for impacted returns.

Alimony Received

Alimony Paid

The site will be placed in maintenance on Tuesday, December 3rd to release the below software updates.

E-FILE

• Moving “Paper” option for State Return Types to bottom of drop-down menu (Enhancement)

FORM 8889 PDF

• Correct alignment issues on the PDF of Form 8889 (Issue 3899)

OHIO (2019)

• Adding a prompt to determine if a Taxpayer needs to complete the SD-100 with their OH return. Available when 2019 states released (TBD) (Enhancement)

SCHEDULES 1 and 2

• Correct a display issue on the PDF of Schedules 1 and 2 where only the TP last name was displaying (Issue 3918)

*Click here to download a PDF of our Cumulative Release Notes & Program Enhancements.

TaxSlayer VITA/TCE support will close today, November 27th at 12:00pm ET and will reopen on Monday, December 2nd at 8:00am ET. We hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

12/2/2019 – The Puerto Rico practice exercises have been updated to 2019.

• Please note current Practice Exercise answers may not reflect some 2019 changes as the application will continue to receive updates as final forms/instructions are released to software vendors. We will work to update the 2019 Practice Exercises as much as possible on a as-needed basis.

11/27/2019 – All Practice Exercises have been updated to 2019 except the Puerto Rico Exercises.

• Please note current Practice Exercise answers may not reflect some 2019 changes as the application will continue to receive updates as final forms/instructions are released to software vendors. We will work to update the 2019 Practice Exercises as much as possible on a as-needed basis.

To help set expectations in the field, the practice exercises under Section 6 of the Practice Lab will be updated to 2019 the week of Thanksgiving. We wanted to provide extra time for additional updates to be applied to the 2019 software before updating the exercises. This time of year both the IRS and State Departments are continually releasing and finalizing forms, schedules, and instructions to software vendors. Regular updates will be implemented into the software as information is released/provided to software vendors. At this time, the practice exercises are still based on the 2018 application.

The site will be placed in maintenance on Monday, November 25th to release the below software updates.

1040-NR, FORM 8843

• Update the requirement to provide either the “Academic Institution” or “Director of Program” information based on if the Nonresident Alien is a Student or Teacher (Issue 2280)

1099-MISC

• Reactivate EIN database with new 1099-MISC layout update

DEPENDENT/QUALIFYING RELATIVE

• Update text from $4,150 to $4,200 (Issue 3887)

REVIEW RETURNS MENU

• At the Group Level, add an “Office” column so reviewers know which office the returns came from (Enhancement)

*Click here to download a PDF of our Cumulative Release Notes & Program Enhancements.

11/21/2019 7:15 pm ET:  The service has been resolved.  If you are getting a blank page, or experiencing slowness going to the Practice Lab or your site, you should open a new browser (not just a new browser tab) and try again.  Our engineers are continuing to investigate to determine the reason for the service errors.

11/21/2019  6:34 pm ET: We are aware some users are receiving run time errors when attempting to access the Practice Lab and/or their site. We are currently investigating.

11/21/19 – 10:42am ET: The service has been resolved.

11/21/19 – 10:39am ET: We are aware some users are receiving run time errors when attempting to access the Practice Lab and/or their site. We are currently investigating.

The site will be placed in scheduled maintenance this evening, Tuesday, November 19th beginning at 7:30pm ET. Scheduled maintenance should last until 10:00pm ET. During the maintenance window, access to the Practice Lab and TaxSlayer Pro Online will be unavailable.