The IRS system is now accepting returns with direct debit dates beyond April 15th, 2020.

The IRS is still working to update their system to accommodate the new July 15th due date.  They are currently not accepting electronic returns with a direct debit date greater than April 15, 2020.  Once they update their systems, these returns can be electronically filed.

If you have a return that has gotten rejected because of the future direct debit date or you have returns that need to be filed with the future direct debit date you will need to hold these returns.  We recommend you create a tag so you can run a report to know which returns need to be filed once the IRS updates their systems.

Enhancement Request:  268773 is now live in TaxSlayer Pro Online 2019

We have added an additional location for you to enter the taxpayer, spouse and dependent IRS Identity Protection PIN.   You can now enter them while you are in the Basic Information Section.

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 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)

5:05:pm ET – Issue 4670 has been resolved. You should no longer see any blank pages at this time.

We were made aware of an issue that was introduced through this mornings deployment as it relates to our State Program. We have opened Issue 4670 to resolve an issue where users are attempting to access a state menu, but instead see a blank page. This occurs only on state menus where either the Taxpayer Picklist or W-2/1099-R Picklists exist. We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Examples of impacted state pages include:

• CA – Form 3532 to add an individual
• MI – Retirement and Pension page to choose a 1099-R
• PA – Adding a 1099-R to Income Subject to Tax page
• PA – Adding a Schedule UE when needing to choose a W-2
• PA Local – Adding a W-2 within Income page

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.

10:49 am EST:  As of 10:45 EST, all application services have been restored.  If you are experiencing an error message, please logout and close the instance of your browser and start a new one, or you can clear your cache.  We are continuing to monitor the application.

10:45 am EST:  You should now be able to login with an error, opening an existing return, create new returns, print, etc in 2019.  We are checking the prior years now.

10:30 am EST:  Our engineers are working to resolve the errors.  We are seeing some calculations and prints.

10:20 am EST:  You may also be experiencing a runtime error when trying to login to the site

Server Error in ‘/ProAvalon’ Application.

Runtime Error

Description: An exception occurred while processing your request. Additionally, another exception occurred while executing the custom error page for the first exception. The request has been terminated.

10:15 am EST:  We have opened an emergency ticket with our IT and Dev teams.  We are getting reports of slowness an errors.