Name: Rethinking 1099 Operations for IRIS: People, Process, and Controls
Uploaded: 2026-06-18T17:01:00.522Z
Duration: 47 min 36 s
Description: Rethinking 1099 Operations for IRIS: People, Process, and Controls

Transcript for "Rethinking 1099 Operations for IRIS: People, Process, and Controls": Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'll just give it a couple more seconds for more folks to join, and then we will dive right into it. Alright. Okay. Well, welcome again. Thank you for joining today's webinar, Rethinking ten ninety nine Operations for IRIS, people, processes, and controls. We're glad you're here and appreciate you carving out time to join us. So before we get started, I'd like to quickly go over a few audience features here in Goldcast. You'll see the chat panel on the right hand side of your screen where you can engage engage with us throughout the session, and the q and a tab where you can also submit questions for our speakers at any time. You will see a polls tab appear in the same panel when a question is asked during this the webinar today. So this will allow you to select your response, so we really do encourage you all to participate. Today's session is being recorded, so please check your inbox in the coming days with the link to the on demand recording. We will also leave time at the end of our session today for q and a. And with that, I'll hand things over to our experts, Brianna and Thank you. Hello. Mike. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. We are going to jump right into this. Here are our disclaimer here with, not providing tax advice, but we're excited to share this content with you. So, again, my name is Brianna Bolen. I'm the director of our ten ninety nine and ACA managed services team here at Sovos. So I oversee a team that supports clients in their, operations and submitting to processing with their tax forms. I've been with Sovos, just over ten years now. And I'll pass it to Mike to introduce himself. Sure. Good morning, everyone. Mike Asher. I lead the product tax center of excellence for Nationwide Financial Services, which is part of Nationwide Insurance. I've been in the the product tax space now for about twenty years. So looking forward to the conversation today. And I should also disclose, we are a a a Solvos client. So Thanks, Mike. So, as a reminder, some of you may have joined our prior webinars. So, this is a part of a five part series that we're running over these past few months. Today is four of five. We have one more coming up after this in July. So hoping to continue those conversations, spark ideas. So today, again, talking about operations, people's process and controls as it relates to processing through iris. We do have a longer agenda today. First, we're gonna just talk about the framework, what's changing, and how it's gonna look, how it's gonna operationally shift, what you're doing. We're gonna talk through four challenges that we are seeing. So legacy workflow dependencies, real time validation, TIN name mismatch risks, and then dual reporting as it relates to state reporting. We're going to cover what good may look like for you and your teams and then some key takeaways and next steps. So first of all, if you have been a part of these webinar series or joined or watched a recording at all, you may be familiar with some of the things that are changing. But at a high level, we're looking at four areas that there are changes. So first, I'm gonna just reminder everyone that fire is sunsetting at the end of this calendar year. It is completely retiring, so there will be no longer access to that. No more submissions through the fire site. All tax year 2026 filings must go through IRIS. So first, the format. Previously with FHIR, we were using a fixed length twelve twenty text file that I'm sure many of you are familiar with and have used for several years. And now it is moving to that structured XML, with the the IRS validating against schemas on submission. So a major change there, very different layout. Next is the actual transmission or the submission. We are, again, sunsetting fire. So we typically, in prior years, that would be manually uploaded through that fire portal. Now we are going to a system to system submission through an approved channel. I apologize that got cut off there. But it is through an approved channel, so you have to, you know, register and go through that process to get that set up to submit through IRIS. The next is validation. So with FHIR, you would only have the format validated, and you typically get that response within two business days. On IRIS, this is going to be a data level, real time, record record by record validation. So a lot different there. A lot more detail goes into that. And then the responses, FHIR would give you a good or bad, or maybe it was an accepted or not accepted status, depending on how you ingested that information. But Iris is actually four tiers. So there's four different responses that you could get, and that's gonna be accepted, accepted with errors, partially accepted, or rejected. So very different, responses there and maybe different how you actually ingest that information. Again, we're kind of going to move into that. So our first challenge here is your whole process was built around fire. Where do we go from here? Sure. So we'll touch on the challenge here. So as you can see here, what what breaks. Right? So we have the end of cycle. The iris is giving you the information in more real time. So it's gonna feel like the process is never done. Right? You're gonna know immediately of the errors, including named 10 mismatches, which I know we all love. And the question's gonna be, what do you do with that information? Currently, the IRS has not given us guidance in the space as to what we're supposed to do when we receive these errors. Right? Are we going to, address this right away? I named in mismatches. What's the plan gonna be? We do not have guidance on that yet. But you would have to prepare for how you are going to ingest that information, back as it comes back to you. Right? For Sovos, they will adjust that for us. But if you are have a homegrown system, you've got to be prepared for. How is that going to come back to you? How are you going to, address those errors? Regarding batch exception, as Brianne touched on here, there's four different responses. Right? You're gonna have accepted, accepted with errors, partially accepted, rejected. So, again, how are you going to ingest that information back? It's going to be more at the record level. And then, additionally, you're gonna have to update your training materials. Right? We've written all of our training materials, all of our processes around the fire system. Now we're gonna need make sure that we're updating that, with the iris system in mind. Right? And then, additionally, if many of you if you're if you have contracts with your vendors, for example, as we do with Sovos, we need to be thinking about those contracts now in terms of the iris system and not the way those contracts have been written for the fire system. So what can you do now to to try to look forward here and address some of these challenges? So looking at your entire workflow and determining where you may need to adjust. Right? So, again, vendor contracts, vendor handoffs, filing calendars, the controls that you have in place. So look at your process holistically and see where you may need to adjust or adapt some of those processes. Look at each piece as an independent independent piece. And is it a hard break on something that's a fire to iris change, a soft break, or no change? So, one thing that we know is the schema is changing, and your names need to be split out for an individual. So is that a hard break? Is it a soft break break? Excuse me. Maybe going back to internal and seeing where you need to, find that source data. Identifying the owners. So really mapping out responsibility of where those changes need to happen and who's gonna own that. And then, sequence the rebuild against the filing calendar and not just the calendar year. So tax year 2026, depending on your form types, we do in '27, making sure that you're prepared for that. The only caveat there, of course, is any submissions through FHIR are cut off at that calendar year. So real time, changes, or excuse me, real time validations really changed the game here. So let's talk about some of those challenges. Yeah. So like everything else, everything's coming at us now in real time. Right? Okay. So this breaks the the wait and see. Right? Okay. We have more, constant and more, middle of the filing season responses that we're gonna have to address. Right? We're gonna receive these error messages, including named 10 errors, instantly. Right? So you have to be thinking about that, per and this isn't just true you know, it's gonna be happening during your actual filing season. Right? For those files that are due, in, January, like the ten ninety nine NECs, you're gonna receive those error messages right away, and how are you gonna response them when you're you're dealing with with tax season on top of that. Right? And it's also important to think about unfortunately, this is happening now throughout every time you're transmitting. Right? So if you're transmitting late originals, corrections, which, you know, we we certainly have those on an ongoing basis. We're not perfect at Nationwide. Right? We have corrections. We're gonna receive these these these responses back every single time. Right? If there's errors, if there's named 10 mismatches, it's all gonna come back to us, and this gets back to how are you going to ingest that information. Right? It's also important to point out here that IRIS, you know, the IRS, went live with IRIS in 2023. What we wanna touch on here, I think it's an important point, is, you know, fire is going away. Right? So how are you going to address, records that were submitted prior under the fire system now are gonna be submitted under the the IRIS system? The IRIS is working to build a bridge there. Okay? And I think it's important to call out. They're working to build a bridge. However, what is clear is that, Iris does not have, the year 2022 prior. Right? It starts in 2023. So the issue that you're gonna have here is if you have corrections that are prior to 2023, I do not believe at this time a great way to ask you to to correct me if I'm wrong. I do not believe at this time there is a plan for how they're going to address, records prior to 2023. Record level routing. Who owns this within your organization? Right? It's gonna be important to figure out, is this going to be the the team that did the submissions, or or is this gonna be going back to your front end associates, your your business units, for those larger organizations? Who's gonna handle this within your organization? You're gonna need to think through that, again, as you're looking at real time, results. Then scheme of validation errors, there's not gonna be an extension. Right? You're gonna have to submit by the deadline or it's late. So what that means is, again, if you have a deadline of January 31 and you submit this, and for some reason the schema is is wrong, right, you receive that message back, you don't get the sixty day extension that you used to get. Right? There used to be a time where, the IRS would allow if there was scheme errors, you had that sixty day extension to correct those errors. That's not gonna be the case here. Right? So you're gonna be thinking about that. Something else that I think is important to point out here, when we look at the IRS has never matched actually on your own payer ID. Right? Your own EIN. They're gonna do that now. They're gonna do name TIN matching on your own payor IDs. And, I think it's important to call out. And I called it out because, even at Nationwide, we discovered, there was a a company that was a relatively small company for us that the name TIN did not match. We had not updated it with the IRS. And we became aware of that. Obviously, we had to update it with the IRS. That would have come back as a name TIN error validation for us, and that's something that I I I I wanna point out here that make sure before you go to IRS that your name TINs are actually updated properly with the IRS. There's no there's no, daylight there. Yes. Exactly. I'll just I'm gonna jump off of that one and say, like, that something like that would, flag as a rejection. So that would be something that your full file, every tax form in your file would reject if your, EIN or your payer information does not match what is in the IRS database. So that's a very important one to note. And so moving into the to the framework here, you know, building an exception triage discipline, not just a reconciliation cadence. So looking at upstream, how can you catch these errors before submission? So thinking about your data, and we're gonna share a statistic here in a few slides about the the Sovos submitted, information, but how can you learn about your errors before? Maybe reflect back on your b notices or maybe do a bulk tin matching to try to determine the percentage of errors you have and how that's going to interrupt your flow in the middle of your tax season. If you're submitting ten ninety nine NECs, like Mike said, that's in January, but you still have other form types you're working through to submit later in the year. You have kind of this, you know, hand over hand where you're continually looking through that data. So, again, defining those record level routing rules, the error type, who owns that, and then the service level agreement there. So is it going back to your front end associates, or is it the tax team that's going to be owning that? Stand up a first touch resolution model that's measured in minutes and not days. So do you need to adjust your full onboarding of an individual? Is that something that you need to to look at not just after you've submitted, but starting now? Like any new accounts or new business that you bring in. And then create these dashboards, help determine your error rate. Is it coming from a specific source? Is it coming from a specific issuer? Really understanding where those errors are coming from and where you can hone in and create that streamlined process to help your, iris submissions year over year and then, potentially, even your b notices year over year. Alright. Really moving into this name TIN mismatch, and the data maturity gap. I'm sad on this one. I'm sad on this one. So this is one we're all gonna have to to address regardless of of if you have a vendor solution or if you have a homegrown, system. So, you know, currently, you have your source systems have stored names in single combined fields for decades. Right? So for many of us, Nationwide is no exception. We have a lot of of systems, administrative systems, and some of them we call the the legacy systems. Right? They've been around for a long time. And you have to look at how do they have the the name stored. Right? Because under the fire system, the name was just in the name one field. Right? So, Michael Asher was all in the name field. Now that's gonna have to be broken out between first, middle, last. Now many administrative systems that are are more modern already have that. Right? So this should just be how you update the the data being sent, but some will not. Like I said, some of your leg these systems may not have that, and this is gonna have to be addressed to make sure that you are breaking out that that name into the first middle last. This also creates the the edge cases, compound compound. Right? So, basically, here what we're getting at is this is just gonna be, present more opportunity for mismatches now, with those those, edge line cases. And then, additionally, the address in country code formatting, this again is gonna present more opportunities here. There's more validations around this. So schema rejects, means that it's it's not submitted timely again, so you're gonna have to address this, ahead of time. Right? You do not wanna get caught, where you're trying to submit something and it's it's, for example, coming back with country code errors and the whole the whole file has been rejected. Right? And then lastly, this is an interesting one to be thinking about, the the notice of backup withholding. Right? So generally speaking, when the IRS notice notifies you through the CP 2,100 or the nine seventy two c g process of a named TIN mismatch, that's a signal, right, that you are to, you know, notify the the the customer, notify the vendor, and that you also are, to begin back withholding. Right? The question that's come in is is does this mean now that when the IRS notifies you through this process, of an aim to mismatch, should you begin back up withholding? I am certainly not saying you sure you shouldn't. I'm saying it's something that that each of each, company is gonna have to address on their own. What is the right answer there? But it's something that needs to be considered. Absolutely. So, you know, treating data quality as a permanent capability and not just your year end project or not just your your notice cycle project. So audit your source systems and look at that name structure. Are they combined? Are they separated? And document that for each of your source systems. So, you know, we're gonna see these increased complexities around hyphenated names or, you know, multiple middle names, trusts, things like that that may already be complex. But now having to split that out and how the IRS is going to give us that real time feedback, it may create erroneous errors, if you don't have those accurate in your file. So stand up that continuous name TIN matching upstream of your filing. So are you doing real time TIN checks? Are you doing a bulk check with the IRS? What is your proactive solicitation process? Are you just doing reactive solicitation? So keeping that in mind, and and Mike mentioned it already, what considerations have you thought of for your your notice processing or any backup withholding that may be required? Establish a data quality, performance indicator. So looking at your metrics, are you having these high error percentage rates or you know, on some systems but not the other? And then building a remediation backlog, so fixing things before, or when are you putting internal deadlines on fixing response errors from the IRS. As of now, there is not a specific timeline on when you need to correct those. Will the IRS change that in the future? We don't know. But making sure that you're keeping in mind how are you gonna continually correct these or what's gonna be your process there. So I mentioned this. I was gonna share the statistics. So twenty four point four percent of all the twenty twenty five IRIS errors that Sovos submitted, out of all of our filings, 24% of those errors received back were named TIN mismatches. So, that was our number one error category for all of the filings that we did in 2026 for tax year 2025. So 25,000 mismatch errors. You know, if you just directly applied that percentage to your data, how many would that be for your company? So definitely something to think about. Not necessarily saying that everybody's gonna be at this error rate, but if you wanna use that as a jump point, that's gonna be, somewhere to start thinking about. Alright. Dual reporting isn't going away. So this is specifically thinking about that state reporting. Brie, I just wanna add that, I am really hoping that we don't have a 24% rate. Yeah. I hope not either. I hope that that continues to go down. So, so so the challenge here, most states are not synced with with IRIS. We're producing, XML. And XML is probably because it's it's IRIS. Right? For federal and twelve twenty, which is fire for states. So so here, you know, no big surprise. You have a situation now where, you know, the the IRS is unveiling this new transmittal system, IRIS, yet the states are still set up for for fire. Right? That's what we're getting at here, and this is is gonna present challenges, for for those of you who maybe have a homegrown system. How do you respond to this? Right? You're gonna have to be aware to to make sure that you're you're transmitting this in the right formats to the states. There are some states, that are are moving certainly, albeit slowly to to address and maybe move to IRIS or a similar format, but that's certainly not written in stone. That's not moving very fast. And, Brie, you can touch on some of those states that, you know, where they stand on that. But, again, you're also gonna have to deal with reconciling. Right? Reconciling the federal, which was transmitted under IRS with the state that's transmitted, under, the fire system or something very similar. And you have some states that don't use either. Right? I'm sure some of the some of the some of you are aware of that already. So so making sure how you're addressing that is gonna be something that's gonna be necessary for this. And and, you know, just touching at the bottom there, most states have not announced the timelines. Right? They they haven't they haven't begun to do this yet. Interesting enough, I will also touch on here, the combined, reporting with the IRS and states. For those of you who who may not be aware, there are there are certain states, you transmit to the federal, and the federal government transmits that to the states. It's combined, reporting. In this situation, the IRS is indicating that they will, take the format from IRIS to, to fire, to the the, twelve twenty formats for 2026 as part of the combined reporting program. They are not committing beyond that. Right? So it's gonna be interesting to see how this all shakes down, in twenty twenty seven four. So I I figured it's important to mention that now. Brie, I'll turn it over to you. Yeah. Exactly. So I'll I'll kind of jump off that point again. So what would that mean? It would maybe mean that you have more direct state reporting. Right? Because those states may not receive the information from the IRS that they were getting in the combined federal state program because the IRS is no longer converting it. So therefore states may require more direct filing. And again, that's looking at tax year 2027, but, something to definitely keep in mind to be prepared for. So, yeah, there's there's going to be this dual reporting. Most states are not ready to ingest IRIS, which means that you still need to follow their formats, either that be a a home you know, a specific format for that state or a twelve twenty. So, establishing a single golden record upstream in of any format, so, you know, being able to take that record and put it into IRS or into a twelve twenty, making sure you understand how that may break out. Record level reconciliation. So, again, how you're submitting a record to the IRS is most likely going to be different than how you're submitting it to a state, and I'll I'll touch briefly in just a moment on which states, may be prepared for IRIS. Decide on your position of the combined federal state filing program. So this is a program that you can opt into or opt out of. Right? So if you opt out of it, that's fine. You would just likely have more direct filing to those individual states. So being prepared to send more data to the the states rather than, that program fulfilling some of the requirements. And then track states, that are ready for IRIS XMLs, and what may be on the horizon. So for example, Colorado, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington Washington and Wisconsin, do support IRIS filings, actually, for tax year '25 in some capacity. So they supported the DA, which is only on ten nine nine d a, which is only on an XML iris schema as well as, ten ninety nine b's. So in using Colorado, for example, if you had ten ninety nine b's that you needed to file, but you also had ten ninety nine miscs that you needed to file, you could potentially file your b's under an iris schema and your MISCs under a twelve twenty schema. So now you used to maybe have one filing to Colorado, but you now you may have two. So that could be the trickle down effect of many states. This past tax year, the golden parachute payments on the MISC were required to go through IRIS, and, October d a. So, obviously, there was a split there already. The states are making that even more complex in how we need to understand. Some other states that have mentioned supporting IRIS in '26 are, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont. So those ones are some to watch out for. But again, I would highly, suggest you all kind of look at all of those states and any, readiness there. Sovos does have tools, and if you're interested in that, definitely reach out to a a Sovos representative or, you can put that at the end. We'll have a an area that you can ask for reach out. So now that we've given you all of these potential challenges, some that you may have already thought about, some that you maybe haven't thought about yet, let's talk about what good might look like. And we've actually touched on a lot of this through this conversation. Right? So this is really highlighting some of what we've already called out already. Right? So for the people, capability, not just capacity. Right? So you need to make sure that you you defined what areas are gonna handle this. Is this gonna be handled by your tax team? Is this gonna be handled more upstream? What processes are changing? Right? That's all part of the the people. Right? Okay. Data quality, permanent annual readiness. Right? Basically, this is all turning into year round. It already feels like that's happened already. For those of us who've been in the tax base for a while, this has all been speeding up. But now this is really speeding it up, and you're going to have to be addressing a lot of these challenges throughout the entire, year, unfortunately. And same thing with processes. Right? It gets to the same thing. Name tint mismatching, who's gonna handle that? You're gonna be handling that pretty much all the time now, potentially, depending on how you choose to respond to those notifications from the IRS when you do transmitals. You know, and that, federal state reconciliations, we just touched on this. You know, you're gonna have to account for the differences between the fed and the states in how you're transmitting in in in those those situations given that you have XML and then twelve twenty formats that are occurring. In terms of the technology, I'm gonna turn this over to Bree, but I what I will say here before I do is for those of us who who use a vendor solution, these are the questions that we really need to be asking our our vendors, our third parties, and making sure that they are ready in this technology space to respond to this. And with that, I will turn that over to our vendor in this third our vendor in this space, Sova. So go ahead, Bree. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, questions to ask first and foremost, are they prepared for IRIS? Right? So Sovos has actually submitted to IRIS the past two tax years, and have continued to learn and partner with the IRS to understand some of these validations, specifically the scheme of validations, and getting prepared to make sure that we can fully support our clients. So, if you aren't using SOVOS or if you have your own system, I recommend doing tests, communicating with your vendor, or, working back with the IRS to to determine what you need to make sure that your schema is valid and will be accepted, or accepted with errors. So filing dashboards, you know, what does this look like? How not just error rates and sources and everything, but how are your vendors, providing you back that information? Every transmittal that's sent through iris gets a response file that has all of the detailed information, and tying that back to your records that were submitted. So how is that going to be processed, in house or with your vendor? Again, the dual format that we just touched on for states. So are is your vendor able to support both submitting a twelve twenty to a state and an XML file as required? And what that what is that gonna look like? And then, with x the XML schemas, there are unique record IDs, and that is going to tie those records together, not only for the errors, but any corrections as well. So making sure that you understand how that's gonna work in your process. Alright. So key takeaways here and some possible next steps. Just kind of three things that if you get anything out of this, reminder, IRIS isn't just an upgrade of fire. It is a completely different process and a completely different model. So the fire era is going away, and just making sure that you're thinking about how it is a replacement and not a migration. Data quality. So that's gonna be super important. Right? You are going to be getting a lot more information back from the IRS immediately. And this is near immediate. Right? So you're getting that likely same day that you submit. So making sure that your schema is ready so that you don't get rejections and, making sure that you are having a way to ingest those response files and the errors back. And then lastly, a plan for the dual format. So states and federal may be different. They likely will be different for 2026 and probably beyond as well. So making sure that you're prepared for that and tracking and having the ability to reconcile when items are being submitted and where. So creating a ninety day plan. So start now. Right? I know many of you will not like hearing this, but January is only, you know, five and a half months away. Feels like we are just getting done, but thinking about Iris, we need to keep going forward. Thank you. So mapping and taking an inventory of all of your fire dependent workflows, your service operating plans and controls, identifying dependency owners, confirming your IRIS TCC application status if you are not using a vendor that does this for you, and then figuring out your baseline for your twenty twenty five errors. So, or maybe it's even twenty twenty four if you're looking back at b notices. So assess and decide, kind of that next step here, your thirty to sixty days, auditing your source data quality, deciding to build or look at XML generation transition, looking at a vendor. Are you currently doing twelve twenty in house, but you maybe need to be looking at a vendor? Defining your record level exception model, and then resolving combined federal state filing and where you're gonna sit on that. And then your your last branch of this is, standing up upstream, TIN name match remediation backlog. How are you gonna handle those? You know, one of the biggest things is that it's not necessarily gonna feel like you're done. You're always gonna be working through those errors. Looking at a target state, right RACI for filing season operations. So responsible, accountable, consulted, informed, making sure you have a plan in place there. Validating road maps with your vendors and platform partners. And then lastly, setting a monthly data quality KPI and dashboards, getting that set up. Alright. I am, gonna share here a polling question. I know that there are some some questions coming in. So kinda thinking about everything that we just said, what is the status of your processing changes? Are you all done? Are you ready to go? I'm thinking that's not gonna be everybody and may not even be a large percentage of people here. Are you in progress, but still have some work to do? Or do you have a lot to consider to take next steps, and haven't started and need to get started? So, please take a second to answer that poll. And, we are going to look through some of these Q and A questions, see what we can answer here. Alright. I'm gonna give it a few more seconds on this poll here. Okay. This second, polling question oh, I'm sorry. Did it show up the there we go. The poll is closed. Thank you. So this this second polling question is really, do you want a SOVAS representative to to reach out to you, to discuss how you can help prepare? So you can go ahead and answer this polling question while, I kinda get started here on some of these questions that we have. And, Mike, feel free to jump in on anything, that I'm starting on. But the fir one of the first questions we received is, you know, considering all of these changes, is the IRS giving the filing deadlines any extension? And as far as we know, nothing outside of the standard 8809 or the automatic extension. As you know, the 1099 NEC does and the w twos don't have extensions, but all of your other form types do. So if you have not previously filed that eighty eight zero nine or the automatic extension of time, that may be something you wanna consider in 2026 in 2027 if you need more time on that. The next question I'm seeing here is is there any guidance for name splitting trusts that are SSNs? So, trusts are notoriously complex. Right? There's lots of different ways that those can be named. And depending on the form type, you may not, be able to actually TIN match that one. So there is not a specific, you know, guidance. The IRS doesn't have a page in their book that says this is how you need to report it. There is, been some working groups at the IRS that maybe suggest putting that in sort of like a DBA and using a name to field as well along with the first, middle, and last names. So something I would definitely look at for, maybe look into one of those working group sessions. They've published a little bit, but it is it is minimal, I would say. Are you still able to submit the ten ninety nine with 10 name mismatch errors with iris, or does it require you to resolve the mismatch, to allow you to submit? So, yes, you you can submit the TIN name mismatches. What will happen is it will come back as a status of accepted with errors. So those errors are what you're getting back as the TIN name mismatches, but it is in an accepted status. If you get a rejection, that means it has not been processed by the IRS and it you need to resubmit. Accept partially accepted means typically that one of your EINs was accepted or accepted with errors, and then one was rejected. So the rejected and partially accepted are ones you definitely wanna look at right away to make sure that you're still within your filing deadline if you get those responses. Hey, Brie. Maybe this is a good time to call out. Yeah. And I'm familiar with with, you know obviously, within within Sovos, within Taxport, and and I'm assuming other vendor solutions, the validations that are in there should match the error messages that that are when you when you go to transmit and send to the IRS. What I'm getting at is, for those who are using a vendor solution, you shouldn't be surprised, by most error messages. You should have already worked those as part of the validations when you were actually in the the the source system. Yeah. The in this case, tax board. So I think it's important to call that out. Right? So so as we look at these error messages, for those who are using a a third party system, chances are there shouldn't be a lot of surprises. Named and mismatches could be one, of course, that always occurs, but the other ones are ones that you should already be aware of before you actually go to to go to transmit. And the other point that I'll make is is, I will be we have those those four options, you know, accepted accepted, with with errors. For those who get a 100% accepted, I am gonna be so jealous. Please please feel free to contact me if that happens. I'm expecting most of us will be somewhere in the other buckets. Hopefully, it's accepted with errors. Yes. I would say in a fully accepted status is is gonna be on the rarer side, but definitely applaud anyone who can achieve that because I think that would be, it's a great thing to strive for for sure, data cleanliness there. So recom somebody asked about recommended lead time to, like, refile those corrections. I don't have a recommendation per se, but what I will say is there are those penalty tiers. So, you know, you may wanna set goals, you know, to have a certain percentage of your records corrected within that so that you aren't, getting those higher penalties. Right? So the first penalty tier would be thirty day within thirty days of your original submission. The next penalty tier is before August 1. So and then anything after August 1 is in that highest penalty tier. So that may be a good jumping point for you. Hey. There's a question here from Marcus. Marcus, I wanna first apologize. It looks like I put a a a laughing face on your question. That was unintentional. I can't figure out how to remove it. So I'm getting used to this this new, portal that we have here. So Yeah. So this is asking about the the Solvos ten nine nine, Pro desktop. That is so, yes, if you are if you are a Solvos client, Solvos will support the outputs for the XML. So only Iris only accepts XML, schemas, and so that is what Solvos will create if you are using that solution. I think there was a good question here regarding, like, test portals, Mhmm. and they were they were asking us if you wanna call that out, Bree. But I think it's good maybe to to but if SOAS has one, then also if the IRS maybe has a testing portal for for those who are using a homegrown solution. Yes. Yep. So, I did I I briefly mentioned it, but, yeah, Sovos is actually submitted through IRS for the past two tax years. So we have gained a lot of knowledge, in working closely with the IRS through that. So there is a testing portal. If you do not use a vendor, you would likely have to sign up for their TCC program and get through, validated through that to be able to access the schemas as well as a testing portal. So if that's something that you're interested in and you, work with Sovos, let's I'd have a conversation with your representative to see what's available. I would have to 100% confirm if there is a window for that. And, the fire used to have a window, so we would wanna confirm that. So if, if you wanna select yes, please contact on the poll here, that would be awesome. I'm looking through a few more of these. So for the TIN name matching, does it tell you what the error is or just if it's an error? So it will tell you, for example, if you submit through if you submit your record as an SSN, it will say this TIN name combination does not match the SSN database, but it doesn't give you any more information than that. Right? It's not gonna give you the correct information. It's just gonna tell you that the combination itself is incorrect. Brie, maybe a last point that I'll make. I. know this is the conversation you and I have had, regarding we we touched on the the CP 2,100 and the nine seventy two CG notices, the penalty notices that we can get for named Tim mismatches. You know, it's interesting that, first of all, last year, I'm sure many of you noticed that the nine seventy two c g notices were not sent out by the IRS for the first time in my career that that has happened. Right? I know you and I have had a conversation around perhaps, this this transmittal and and and the names and mismatches being sent to us now pretty immediate once we do the, you know, transmit. Perhaps, while there's no guidance yet, this could change that that process of looking at the CP twenty one hundred and nine seventy six CGs in the future. I don't know if you wanna comment on that. Just something I know you and I have had the conversation about. There's no guidance yet, but it's just. kinda stimulating. Yeah. So yes. Exactly. There's no guidance yet on if that process is going to change, but, you know, the IRS does have some guidance around, when you should start back up withholding and if it's, you know, on the b notice or if you're it is in this real time. But, you know, could be some speculation that the IRS may become stricter on abatements because they are giving you that information upfront. Again, no guidance there, but possible speculation. So really thinking about that process, and how that may impact your business. Have you previously worked with b notices or proactive solicitations? So could be important, something to to think about, ahead of time. And then, Jennifer here had asked about, discrepancies with the TIN matching tool and what appears to be false, positive matches. So the way that the iris schema looks at it, it is gonna look at those name controls. So, for a business, it's gonna be the first four characters of the name, excluding, obviously, like, something like the. And then for a individual, it is gonna be the first four of the last names. So the IRS doesn't necessarily give explicit guidance on how they're matching it, but that is the guidance for the bulked in matching. And so we, you know, assume that they apply that as well to the transmittal. I'm gonna jump in on that and just. a pro tip. Right? If you ever have a situation where you don't know if it's an SSN or EIN, it's really okay to send it as as unknown. Right? And that actually may be to your benefits, because the way the IRS does this is if you indicate it's an SSN, they're gonna bump it up against the Social Security Administration database. If you indicate it's an EIN, I believe it's a in a database that's that the IRS actually has that they maintain. If you don't indicate, they'll bump it up against both. Yep. And so so, you know, that's just something, I'll call it a pro tip here. If you ever have reason where you're not sure, indicating unknown is really is okay in that situation. That's how you actually may avoid a a name to miss match or, like, a notice. Yep. Yep. Exactly. I think I might have missed a question earlier, but I just wanna jump back and clarify. So someone asked if they do a bulk 10 matching and they find that they have issues with their matching, should they pull those out of their filing? And I would say no. You wanna still submit those and just get it back as an error because it is still considered a timely filing even if it is an error. Yeah. I can only speak for myself in that situation. I would still I would still send them through. Yep. As a yep. I think we've answered most questions here. But if we didn't get to your question, please feel free to reach out or, again, answer yes on this polling question, and we can certainly, connect with you. And then, reminder that there is one more webinar in this series, rebuild or buy for IRIS, making the right long term decision for ten ninety nine reporting. So if you have not registered for that, I encourage you to do so. The link is available in the additional resources section. Even if you are not able to attend that session live, you will get the on demand link a few days after. So definitely recommend that you all take a moment to, sign up for that one. And then just wanted to say thank you for everyone, for joining us today. It's a really hot topic and a really interesting one as it evolve continues to evolve as we're leading towards tax year 2026 filing. And, Mike, thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate your time, and your thoughts and input on this. Brie, I appreciate being a part of it, and I appreciate you taking the lead. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.