IRS shares progress made on forthcoming 1099 platform

Good news for your finance team: The Service’s new online platform for filing 1099s is coming along nicely.

As you know, the Taxpayer First Act calls for the development of a new online portal – similar to the SSA’s Business Services Online system for W-2s – to help your company prepare, file and maintain records of 1099s by 2023. Here’s a look at where things stand now.

Initial discussion of 1099 platform

Last June, the Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee (ETAAC) released an annual report that included a discussion on how it envisions the 1099 platform operating.

According to the report, IRS is collecting insight from external stakeholders and industry pros to identify best practices and understand what functionality users want.

Among other things, the report suggests the 1099 platform include:

• full integration into the broader IRS IT systems to enable data flow, and
• real-time data validation between IRS and states to prevent delays.

Recent developments

More recently, in a February IRS Payroll Industry Call, the Service gave another update.

It explained that in November, there was a demo of the 1099 platform with the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council (IRSAC) and the ETAAC. It’s also working with the Office of Online Services to ensure the new portal has a seamless interface with all other IRS sites.

In addition, it conducted interviews with three-dozen practitioners and, based on their feedback, made several adjustments to the 1099 platform. That includes:

• making changes to the dashboard
• adding more information on different form types, and
• ordering form entry to make it the same order as the paper 1099.

Next, IRS says it’ll be working more closely with its IT team on the 1099 platform. And perhaps most importantly, the Service said it’s still on target to meet its deadline of Jan. 1, 2023.

Stay tuned – we’ll keep you posted on any future developments.