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From Bloomberg News, but not on IRS site. "Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The Internal Revenue Service said it may try to prevent tax preparers such as Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. and H&R Block Inc. from offering customers refund loans and audit insurance because they can encourage fraud.

The plan, if adopted by the IRS, would restrict tax preparers from passing along tax return information to lenders who provide instant refunds and then charge customers predatory interest to repay the loans. Consumer groups and taxpayer advocates have urged the government to crack down on such practices. "

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jReply to above

for many years. Not likely to happen, too much money in campaign coffers of Congress from financial institutions to expect such a ban on loans. And, it is an incentive for many low income people to actually file a return, which they would avoid if they weren't getting a bunch of money back in time to pay Feb. rent.

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"H&R Block Comment On Proposed RAL Restrictions

Thursday January 3, 4:33 pm ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--We look forward to working with the IRS on continuing to develop best practices for refund anticipation loans, just as we did over the past two years on the privacy rules announced today, which reflect many of H&R Block’s existing guidelines. H&R Block’s tax professionals are not compensated on the sale of ancillary products, so there is no incentive for them other than serving taxpayers’ best interests. In addition, RALs are currently regulated by 10 federal laws and IRS rules. The typical RAL at H&R Block costs about 2 percent of the principal, or less than the cost of a credit card advance, bank overdraft, or in many cases, using an ATM."

I read the Proposed Marketing Restriction on the IRS website.

Following is one of the new rules, will be effective Jan 1 2009, (not sure if it is enacted or only proposed):

"Among the new rules:

Generally, preparers must obtain taxpayer consent, either by paper or electronically depending on how the return is being filed, before tax return information can be disclosed to any third party or used for any purpose other than filing the return.

If the taxpayer consents to the disclosure and use of his information, the consent must identify the intended purpose of the disclosure, identify the recipients and describe the particular authorized disclosure or use of the information."

If this does / is in effect you may want to check if the consent will be required for any taxpayer you are efiling with ATX or Taxwise in 2009, since starting this year, the company will retain all of the client's information that is being efiled and it will be accessible by anybody working in the Georgia customer service/tech support division. In prior years ATX was always very careful about protecting clients information and all senisitive information i.e. SSN, account numbers etc... were data stripped and not accessible by customer service/ tech support. All information efiled starting Jan. 11 will be viewable by any of their customer service staff.

I have been here the whole time... watching and commenting whenever I might be able to assist.

And yes, we do love you guys.

I have been reading the old board and now the new board for several years, but until the layoffs never posted. I guess because with the old board it was policy that employees couldn't post without specific permission, so even with the un-official board I assume many, like myself, were still a little hesitant. But now, well, I enjoyed very much what I did at ATX and all of you customers, and will be around to help out when I can. But I am really gonna miss talking to you guys !!!

I have sent in my application to atx. I have already took care of the on line training with HSBC, I have not heard back from my application at atx. Does anyone know how long it may take? Can I set fees after that?

Also keep in mind, HSBC is not allowing doc prep fees this year. You will only have the preset transmission fee and the efile fee. I was last told that they hoped to have the integration for the bank manager up and running on 1/3 so customers could pull their enrollment into the program etc...

Everyone else is having the same issue.

The 2006 labels still work so you should be able to print them from there for now.

The problem has been reported to ATX already and hopefully there will be a fix shortly.

If you go to Preferences inside of the 2007 ATX program, under Print, there is an option to print mailing slips with return address on Left or Centered, if you change this to Centered, it should print with the same alignments as 2006, and you won't need to go back to the 2006 program to print your mailing labels.

This was supposed to be updated to the ATX knowledgebase a few days ago, but since the layoffs affected the staff who post updates to the knowledgebase I don't know what happened to the updated information.