Phone Support for Practitioner Priority Service, e-Services Help Desk, and e-Services FIRE and AIR are temporarily down.

Businesses across the country are grappling with the challenges of limiting social contact, and the Internal Revenue Service is no exception. Presumably taking precautionary measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 at IRS locations, the agency today announced via the Quick Alerts for Tax Professionals newsletter that they were temporarily suspending phone support for certain preparer-related services and processing of Income Verification Services (IVES) requests.

Three tax professional-specific support programs are affected by this closure: “Due to staff limitations, Practitioner Priority Service line, the e-Services Help Desk line, and the e-Services FIRE and AIR system help desks are closed until further notice.” While phone support will be unavailable, the IRS said that preparers could use IRS.gov as an online reference resource.

In addition to not accepting new IVES requests, the IRS said they were “experiencing delays with existing IVES processing as well as CAF number authorizations.” While tax professionals will be unable to use IVES to get transcript information during this time, the IRS suggested an alternative: “Practitioners with e-Services accounts and with client authorization can access the Transcript Delivery System to obtain prior-year transcripts.”

The IRS ended the newsletter by noting they are currently not able to provide information or guidance on the $2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill.

Source: 3/27 Update on IRS Services