IRS to Enable Remaining Tax Forms by Early March

The Internal Revenue Service plans to allow more of the remaining tax forms that have not been available for electronic filing yet this tax season to go through during the first week of March. In an email to software developers and transmitters on Wednesday, the IRS noted that due to late legislation, the IRS delayed startup for the tax forms listed below until the first week in March. To ensure there are no issues with accepting the forms for downstream processing, the IRS is asking software developers and transmitters to adhere to the following plan: The schemas and business rules will be deployed in the Production environment during the March 3, 2013 Sunday maintenance window. When the Production environment becomes operational at 7:00 am Eastern Time, transmitters should only send their stockpiled inventory of tax returns they have held back, evenly spread throughout the day on Sunday, This will allow the IRS’s Modernized e-File system team to quickly review the reject trends for the returns to ensure the schemas and business rules work as intended. “Please do not enable online filing for the forms until the IRS officially announces the processing of these forms targeted for the first week of March,” the IRS asked. Barring any problems, the IRS will then send out a QuickAlert email early in the week announcing the official opening. At that time, it will ask companies to enable online filing for these forms.