The TaxSlayer Pro Online site (including Practice Lab) will be placed in scheduled maintenance on Monday, December 16th from 8:00p – 10:00p ET. During this window, users will not be able to access the site.

When inside TaxSlayer Pro Online on the Welcome Page, we wanted to point out the “VITA/TCE Publications and User Guides” area to highlight the information available to VITA/TCE sites. This makes for quick access to important documents while inside the application.

• Publication 4012: Volunteer Resource Guide
• Publication 17: Federal Income Tax Guide
• Publication 4299: Privacy, Confidentiality, and Civil Rights
• Publication 1084: Volunteer Site Coordinator Handbook
• TaxSlayer Pro Online User Guide
• TaxSlayer Pro Online 1040-NR User Guide
• TaxSlayer Pro Online Amended Return User Guide
• TaxSlayer FSA Presentation (provides insight into the TaxSlayer FSA software)
• IRS Reject Resource Guide (highlights the top Federal Reject Codes VITA/TCE sites receive and how to best resolve them)

Pre-season Customer Support hours for VITA/TCE sites began this past weekend. Support hours are now as follows for the remainder of the 2019 calendar year.

• Monday-Friday: 8am-8pm ET
• Saturday-Sunday: 8am-8pm ET

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

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.

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.