Contacting the IRS is getting more and more difficult. It’s so bad now that a company (Enq) is selling access to IRS phone lines by tying them up with robocalls. For the near future at least, online services will be the best way for tax professionals to help their clients by getting direct access to IRS records and notices. Hours of waiting on the phone can now be replaced by a few emails and clicks of the mouse.
How is this possible? Through the new IRS online and tax pro accounts. Introduced in 2021, these new accounts are loaded with important tax information and make identifying and resolving IRS issues many times easier. With an IRS online account, each taxpayer can see how much they owe, view IRS notices, get tax transcripts, and track tax payments, penalties, estimates, and economic stimulus payments.
Even better, tax professionals can link to these online accounts and help their clients by sending requests for tax information or power of attorney directly to their client’s online accounts. There’s no longer a need to wait for IRS employees to process forms 8821 or 2848. Once the client sees a request from their tax pro and approves it, that person gets immediate access to whatever records they would need from their tax pro account.
This is an exciting development for tax preparers and allows for faster and better access to tax information than ever before. Many IRS notices can be elected to be received via email and dealt with digitally instead of handling cumbersome paper notices. (Those will still be around.) Important concerns remain about online security and the comfort levels of elderly taxpayers with these types of accounts, but this certainly looks to be central to the direction that the IRS is headed in: less in-person and phone help, and more online self-service.
This is where NoticeNinja comes in. With NoticeNinja you have a visual dashboard showing you all government compliance matters in a single location, with a single knowledge base repository. NoticeNinja manages all online accounts at the IRS, State, City, Local, and International levels for you, your team, and clients. NoticeNinja tracks the agency, agency contact, online web links with username and passwords, and all correspondences with the agencies, and clients. As the IRS goes digital it is time to digitize your tax office workflows with NoticeNinja.
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By Dan Connors in collaboration with NoticeNinja