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Enhancement request submitted 28 April 2025. I will update this topic with updates from TaxSlayer.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Enhancement request submitted 28 April 2025. I will update this topic with updates from TaxSlayer.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Enhancement request submitted 28 April 2025. I will update this topic with updates from TaxSlayer.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Enhancement request submitted 28 April 2025. I will update this topic with updates from TaxSlayer.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Thanks to the efforts of D22's industrious DC, who did a physical inventory during her "visit to every site" tour at the end of TY24, D22's reconciliation of OIS2 to reality is complete. Status for every Chromebook has been updated.

One Chromebook, A/T 500030658, remains to be recovered, a process that has been escalated to State and National.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

I have sent the following to those volunteers in my district who have been assigned Chromebooks:

This is stored in the "Correspondence Templates" folder of the PA1 Technology shared drive.

D22 asks counselors to retain Chromebooks in shutdown mode across the summer hiatus, saving me a basement full of Chromebooks and saving the AARP Foundation the cost of a climate-controlled storage unit. This approach works well for D22.

If you wish, feel free to use the template verbatim or altered as you see fit to match the processes and volunteers in your district.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Maurite Plouff, NTSC Chair, has shared the following NTSC Guidance regarding Recap:

Our guidance on Recap -- a feature that was added in ChromeOS 130, and which will therefore appear when your system rolls to LTS/132: DO NOT ENABLE IT. [...] it could preserve and then display taxpayer PII.

We're looking into a way to turn it off for the entire TaxAide domain. Meanwhile, NTSC advises against it.

When you see the prompt for Recap on the first startup after the update to 132, respond "No thanks."

If, absent this guidance, you turned it on or if you wish to verify that it is off, do the following:

1. Open Settings
2. Click System preferences on the left menu
3. Scroll down on the right to find 'Welcome Recap."
   
4. Make certain the setting is Off.
   

Many thanks for taking this NTSC-recommended action to preserve the privacy of our Taxpayers' information.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Last one for now...to be submitted 28 April.

Many thanks in advance for critique, comments, and suggestions.

Change “EroName” error message on ERO Setup Page to something descriptive

The present message requires a TaxSlayer support ticket to understand. [Yes, the entire text of the error message is "EroName"]

When sites are reordered, and perhaps when new sites are ordered, the office name on the order is propagated to the ERO Name regardless of the length of the office name. When the office name is longer than 30 characters and the ERO Setup is subsequently updated using the Web interface, the message “EroName” appears on the screen under the ERO name.

This message is not used when a person attempts to type an ERO Name longer than 30 characters on the web interface. The web page stops accepting characters after 30 have been typed. It only appears when sites are first set up or re-opened and have an office name greater than 30 characters long.

It may be well to consider when propagating an office name to the ERO Name, truncating the office name to 30 before placing it in the ERO Name field. Only the ERO Name should be truncated. The office name should remain unchanged.

Regardless, the current error message should be improved.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Disablement also includes

n. Remove the Print Invoice print set from all print set views.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Hi Folks,

Yes, confirming, there are two places where one can print using a print set; one lists four and the other 12. There are four more places in TaxSlayer where one can print but one cannot select a print set.

1. (only the four original defaults shown).

2. of the E-file menu (all 12 shown).

Let me know how/if the links work. Note that the screenshots were taken in the practice lab, hence no PA1 or D22 print sets.

I'm flummoxed over the inclusion of the "two copies" and "three copies" print sets. I would think one could select multiple copies as part of the print dialog. TaxSlayer's acceptance of this request would moot my pendant rant.

I am also grateful for the questions about the number. I'll likely clarify the enhancement request to include this so that a first reviewer of the request doesn't dismiss it out of hand because, "everyone knows there are only four default print sets, gee, look right here." :-)

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Third planned submission; fear not, there is only one more after this one. Critique and suggestions welcome. All to be submitted on April 28th.

Many thanks in advance!

Allow Office or ERO Setup to suppress all references to fees

Add a checkbox to Office Setup or ERO Setup, whichever is appropriate, to disable all fee-related functionality for the office or ERO. This checkbox would be used by VITA/TCE offices to remove functionality inappropriate for a volunteer tax preparation service, such as is offered by AARP Foundation Tax-Aide.
Disablement includes:

1. Disabling generation of an invoice page, even if included in the Print Set. An invoice serves no purpose, is a waste of paper if printed, and a waste of time to suppress for a VITA/TCE program.

2. Disable the Fees tab of the Efile menu. The tab should not appear at all, just as the Bank Information tab does not appear when no direct deposit/direct debit options are selected for the return.

Tax-Aide completed roughly 1.1 million returns in tax year 2023. That means preparers and quality reviewers had to skip past that tab, which is a required visit, 2.2 million times. More if multiple reviews of the return are required. That wastes preparer and reviewer time, especially if the site has a dodgy Internet connection—not uncommon for volunteer spaces. TaxSlayer’s infrastructure had to serve up the Fees page at least 2.2 million times to no good end.

Add the non-Tax-Aide VITA/TCE return counts to those numbers.

I suspect the fee page suppression code already exists in TaxSlayer to support the retail pay-for product and the custom URLs used for Tax-Aide’s Facilitated Self Assistance Service Delivery model. Implementation might be limited to coding for the added user interface element and making the Fees page code sensitive to the setting created by that addition.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

I'm not sure much can be added to this, but if there's something, I would welcome it. To be submitted on the 28th as well.

Many thanks!

Display a site’s Relational EFIN on the ERO Setup page

If a site is included in a Relational EFIN or a Master Shared Account, that information should be displayed read-only on the ERO Setup screen in configuration.

In Tax Year 2024, our split state had an issue with sites (EFINs) not being listed in one of our two Relational EFINs. It took multiple interactions on a support ticket to a) determine that the Relational EFIN for one of the missing sites was incorrect, and then to b) determine which sites were assign to the incorrect EFIN.

The support interactions were very timely, professional, and pleasant. But it took quite some time and effort to get to the point where we felt a support ticket was the right next step. The proposed enhancement would eliminate the need for the ticket and for the pre-ticket diagnosis effort.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22

Hello Fellow Volunteers,

ChromeOS 132 is rolling out now. You may encounter it on Chromebooks that have not been stored for the off-season.

The update includes a ChromeOS feature called Recap. You are prompted on first startup of 132 whether you wish to turn on Recap.

Recap appears to be similar to the Microsoft Windows 11 Recall feature, a feature that has very concerning privacy implications. A screen shot is attached. NTSC has been asked to provide guidance on enabling this feature.

In the meantime, I will turn it off and suggest others do the same. It's easy to turn back on if that's NTSC's recommendation.

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Stephen "Steve" Orso
TC, PA1-D22