First, we want to thank each of you for your dedication and commitment to make this a banner year for return production.  SPEC’s goal is not only to reach 4 million returns for Filing Season 2018, but also serve more taxpayers and touch more lives by offering as many free tax preparation options as possible.  We are confident and poised to accomplish great things this filing season with your assistance.

To help track our progress, we have developed weekly projections to determine where we should be in relation to our 4.0 goal.  Each week this message will be updated with our progress and promote SPEC’s theme: SPEC 4.0, Watch us Grow!

For the week ending 3/4/2018, 356,317 returns were projected to be completed.  We reached an actual count of 313,542 and are almost at the 1.5 million mark. Our cumulative return count is 1,468,961.

While the actual count is below the SPEC projection, there is still time to narrow the gap!

If you have any ideas on ways to help this initiative, we would love to hear from you! Some of you may consider extended hours or days.  Every little bit helps!

Thanks for your engagement and all you are doing to provide free tax assistance to the taxpayers in your community!

SPEC Headquarters

Purpose:  Allows you to quickly view the returns that were prepared at the site in the prior year during a specific time period that have not been prepared during the current year.

Benefit: Helps in planning and helps understand taxpayer retention patterns.

How do I use the report?

(1) Navigate to the Reports menu and click Select on Client Retention Report

(2) Select the EFIN and PRIOR year date range

(3) Click Continue.  The report will generate a list of clients that had returns prepared during that time period that have not had their returns prepared for the current year.

We released Phase I on Friday, March 2nd of having the ability to print the Certified Acceptance Agent information on the bottom of Form W-7 when applying for or renewing ITIN applications.

Navigate to the Preparer(s) menu in configuration

Edit an existing Preparer or Create a new one

There is a new section located between the Personal Information Section and Login Account Section

This is where you enter the information that will carry along with your preparer name to the Acceptance Agent portion of the W-7

Blog posted 03/07/2018

We received the following from the MA DOR:

Refunds Changed from Direct Deposit to Paper Check

February 26, 2018: DOR has just released a number of income tax refunds via paper check where direct deposit had been requested on the tax returns. DOR sometimes changes the refund delivery method from direct deposit to paper check as an additional security measure and this action was taken in an effort to honor these early refund requests more quickly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Here is the link:

Click Here

Update 2:43 pm — verification code emails are now functioning properly.  You will most likely need to request a new code if yours was delayed and you have since closed your browser session

Update 2:05 pm — 2014 calculations and prints are rendering

Update 1:59 pm — 2015 calculations and prints are rendering

Update 1:56 pm — 2016 calculations and prints are rendering

Update 1:42 pm — We are in the process of making the prior year calculations and prints available.  This process will take approximately 1 hour to complete.

Update 1:29 pm — 2017 print is now rendering a PDF from all areas, Client List, Summary/Print and the Submission page in e-file.  I am going to keep this blog post updated with prior year information as well.

Update 1:21 pm — Print from Summary/Print is now rendering a PDF.  We are now working on bringing the print up from the Client List and E-file

Update 1:17 pm — We are testing print internally now and will post another update in approximately 10 minutes

Update 1:07 pm — We are in the process of making the print available.  This also appears to be impacting getting authentication emails.  Once we get print back online, we will look at this.

Update 12:49 pm — We are still actively working to get 2017 prints rendering as the top priority, and then investigate prior years

Update 12:36 pm — Items impacted:

• TY2017 — All prints
• TY2016 — Prints and calculations
• TY2015 — Prints and calculations
• TY2014 — Prints and calculations

Update:  Ticket 1478 is currently being worked by our IT and software engineers.  This is impacting 2017 and 2016 printing inside and outside of the return

We have opened a ticket to investigate the PDFs not generating for print

We will be performing our March maintenance on Sunday, March 4th from 1:00 am – 7:00 am EST.  The sites will be unavailable during this time.

Blog posted 03/02/2018

We have released Phase I of having the ability to print the Certified Acceptance Agent information on the bottom of Form W-7 when applying for or renewing ITIN applications.

Navigate to the Preparer(s) menu in configuration

Edit an existing Preparer or Create a new one

There is a new section located between the Personal Information Section and Login Account Section

This is where you enter the information that will carry along with your preparer name to the Acceptance Agent portion of the W-7

Note: For EIN to carry to W-7, it needs to be entered in ERO Setup within Configuration

Phase II is scheduled to be delivered next week

Phase II is actually carrying the data to this section which is scheduled for the week of March 5th

Update 10:36 am EST — This has been resolved

Update 10:25 am EST —  We have found the issue in the code stream and are currently working to update it.  An alternative solution that works the majority of the time is to click the Back arrow button of the browser to take you back to the page you were on before and then click continue as normal.  We are seeing this work for most of the returns.

————————————————

We have received several calls about an Unexpected Server Error in Healthcare and E-file.  We are currently investigating this.

Rather than clicking log back in button, close the browser, and open a new instance of the browser, log back in.  This will route you to a different server.