2/24/2020 – Issue 4520 for the Working Family Credit was resolved with this mornings deployment.

Issue ID 4520

Minnesota has implemented new requirements for the Working Family Credit this year to expand the population of people that qualify for the credit.   In prior years, you must have been eligible to receive the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to receive the Minnesota Working Family Credit. Beginning with tax year 2019, you may be eligible for the credit if you are between the ages of 21 and 64 with no qualifying children or have income that exceeds the limitations of federal EITC.

We are currently working to make this change with the goal of pushing the change live on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

If you feel like you have taxpayers over the weekend that qualify for this credit, you can go ahead and file their federal return, tag the return and file MN as state only once the change has been deployed.

Nothing to worry about, the functionality will remain the same.  At some point in the near future we will be moving away from the red and green backgrounds on the action buttons that are located on the Welcome page, configuration and other pages outside of the return.

We will be moving to a more pleasant look that utilizes our existing Blue action buttons.  You will see more combinations of Blue and white.

Click here to download the FSA User Guide, Best Practices Guide and Chrome troubleshooting tips.

Remember:  You must always start from the URL you received from TaxSlayer.

2/25/2020 – This issue was resolved with this mornings deployment.

Scenario:  The volunteer is using Internet Explorer and receives the following error message when clicking “Start New Return”:

The email carrier that we to pickup the emails and send after they leave our data center posted they were having issues around 6:30 PM last night.  They had their issues resolved and were sending out emails at approximately 8:30PM

MFA emails are currently not being received at the client side.  An alternative is having the site admin email support to have a cell phone number added for authentication purposes.

Update 6:57 pm:   We are showing signs of the site rendering pages and prints as expected.  We are continuing to review the logs to determine what caused the sudden slowdown and error pages.

Update 6:49 PM EST:  The engineers are investigating the sporadic behavior.  Not all volunteers are experiencing the same thing and some are experiencing no issues.  Below is what we are hearing from volunteers:

• Taking over 3 minutes to login
• Timing out when logging out
• Cannot open existing returns
• Cannot start new returns
• Run time errors when moving through the return

We are aware there is something going on with the site.  We have just opened an emergency ticket for the developers and engineers.  We will update the blog momentarily with more news/

The conference begins at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on February 13, 2020; you may join the conference 5 minutes prior.

Dial-in: 888-251-2949 or 215-861-0694
Access Code: 3719634#

This an opportunity to hear from TaxSlayer about the software and the filing season.  Participants will have an opportunity to ask general software questions.  Keep in mind that TaxSlayer cannot answer tax return or site specific questions on this call.   TaxSlayer VITA/TCE Support is available to handle return and site specific questions.

We will be putting the site in maintenance mode for 15 minutes on Friday, February 7th at 4:30 am EST.