When we first built our integration with the IRS three years ago, we built it through a program called the Income Verification Express Service (IVES). We’d heard that FAFSA did something similar and a couple financial aid professionals told us that it would be “a total game-changer” if we could figure out how to do automatic tax verification for private K-12 school financial aid.

Now, three years later, we are proud to be able to say that we have retrieved almost half a million tax documents automatically from the IRS. In the process, we’ve learned a ton about working with the IRS and have built lots of automation to manage the various intricacies and edge cases associated with retrieving hundreds of thousands of tax documents.

While IVES is one way to retrieve tax documents from the IRS, there are others, and soon after we finished our first financial aid season, we started exploring some of the other IRS systems for retrieving tax documentation. We accelerated this work to build an additional IRS integration earlier this year in part due to a January announcement from the IRS that they intended to restrict the usage of IVES to only mortgage lenders.

In March, the IRS decided to reverse that decision, allowing the continued usage of the IVES system for non-mortgage lenders. While we were pleased with this decision, we continued to build a second IRS integration, both because it offers significant advantages over IVES and also because we want to ensure continuity for schools and families should any future changes occur with IVES.

We have continued to work on this additional IRS integration throughout 2024 and are very close to being ready to share more information with you about it. Later this week, we will send an email with details about this new IRS integration and the enhancements to our automatic tax verification process that will come from it. In the meantime, as always, feel free to reach out if you have any feedback, thoughts or questions.

Best,

Brennan