Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all of the selfless volunteers who give your time to service the needs of their taxpayers.  This year’s celebration looks a lot different than last year with this year’s new term “Social Distancing”.  We recognize that many of you are no longer able to service your taxpayer’s today because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  However, we want to commend you on the 1.8+ Million taxpayers you have provided services for since January 15th.  We raise our Shamrock glasses to you and celebrate your hours of service on this St. Patrick’s Day 2020.

Effective 3/16/2020 Until Further Notice

In an effort to provide the most effective support (telephone, chat, and email) and to take a proactive measure to restrict the spread of COVID-19 among our employees and community, we will be changing our support hours of operation until further notice.  This allows us to provide social distancing for the well-being of our staff.

• Monday through Friday: 9:00am – 8:00pm Eastern time
• Saturday/Sunday: 9:00am – 3:00pm Eastern time

As guidelines from the CDC change, we will continue to work with the IRS to make adjustments and to set expectations.  This is a challenging time for everyone and we appreciate the service you are providing to the taxpayers.

Beginning March 16, AARP Foundation will suspend all Tax-Aide services until further notice due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation. Tax-Aide volunteers, please do not deactivate sites in TaxSlayer; by doing so you will not be able to complete unfinished returns or start new ones when sites reopen.

We don’t know at this time whether Tax-Aide operations will start up again in some or all locations for the remainder of the tax season, or if the tax season is extended. We’ll continue to monitor and assess, and will post an update if sites reopen.

The conference begins at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on March 12, 2020; you may join the conference 5 minutes prior.

Dial-in: 888-251-2949 or 215-861-0694
Access Code: 5384539#

The majority of the time, this does not impact the states, but we have seen this impact the state being made available for pick up.  There are many reports that can be run, but the following report is comprehensive:

How can I determine which state returns were successfully electronically filed?

We recommend running the Pro Web Returns – Detailed Return Report located under Management Reports

• Defaults to Tax Year 2019
• Enter a Start Date and End Date
• Select the checkmark next to the EFIN (even though there is only one)

You can either select Run Report or Run report for Export.  Either way, you may want to export the data so you can sort it

What information does this report give me?

• Group Name (Will be blank)
• EFIN
• Last 4
• First Name
• Last Name
• Telephone
• Federal Status
• Federal Return Type (e-file, paper, direct deposit, direct debit, etc)
• Federal Refund (negative if balance due)
• State (state abbreviations…If the return had more than 1 state, the return will have multiple rows)
• State return type
• State Refund
• State Status
  • You are looking for blanks where the state refund/balance due is no $0.00 and return type is not paper and the federal return is not marked as “in progress”
• Stated date (date return was started)

We are aware that some users with the following e-mail providers: [email protected]; [email protected]; or [email protected] may be experiencing issues with receiving the MFA e-mail.

We have verified that our MFA emails are being distributed to all email accounts.  If you are not receiving them, we recommend checking your junk mail or spam mail.  MFA allows you to either receive a code via email or text.  If you continue to have issues receiving the emails to access the application an alternative would be to use a different email account or add a cell phone number to receive MFA via text messaging.  Another troubleshooting tip would be to add [email protected]  and [email protected] as a safe sender within your e-mail account settings.

Customer support can assist you adding a cell phone number or changing to a different email account.

QSRA Number: QSRA 2020-01

Issued:  January 22, 2020

QSR Topic:  Quality Site Requirement #4 – Reference Materials

Reason Issued:  Change in policy: Quality Site Requirement (QSR) #4 – Reference Materials

New Policy:  QSR #4 is expanded to include the Publication 4299, Privacy, Confidentiality, and Civil Rights – A Public Trust (PDF), as one of the required reference materials that must be available (either in paper or electronic format) at the site for use by volunteers. To heighten awareness of security requirements at VITA/TCE sites, Publication 4299 is now required to be readily available to coordinators and volunteers at the VITA/TCE sites.

References:  The Publications 17, 4012 and 4299 are all available for download on IRS.gov or by signing into the TaxSlayer tax preparation software and selecting the option VITA/TCE Publications and User Guides found on the Navigation Bar.

The following VITA Tax Alerts can be accessed with the link below:

VTA-2020-01  Issued January 13, 2020:  Tax Law Extenders

VTA-2020-02 Issued January 29, 2020:  Form 1099-R Box 7 Distribution Codes • Self-Employed Health Insurance Deduction • Special Rule for Determining Earned Income for Individuals Impacted by Federally Declared Disasters

VTA-2020-03 Issued March 3, 2020:  Medicaid waiver payments and refundable credits

Click here to view VTAs