Tax Help Software (THS)

Roger Nemeth, an enrolled agent running a large tax franchise in Atlanta, watched his staff sit by a fax machine waiting on IRS transcripts, went looking for software that would automate it, found none, and wrote it himself in 2010. That origin explains the shape of the product, which is not a case management system and should not be evaluated as one. THS is a transcript engine. It talks to the IRS Transcript Delivery System, works out which transcripts a given client actually needs, orders them in bulk, and turns the raw account data into readable reports for the practitioner and for the client. The vendor now trades as Audit Detective, LLC out of Havana, Florida, and says users have downloaded over four billion transcripts through it.

Coverage is the widest in this category. Account transcripts reach back to 1990, return transcripts cover four years, wage and income covers ten, and business coverage takes in 1120, 1120S, 1041, 1065 and payroll returns along with separate assessments and civil penalty modules. Out of that come CSED calculations, bankruptcy discharge analysis, a ten-year wage analysis, collections and lien detection, and an audit red flag report. Monitoring runs from a dashboard against live IRS accounts, and the vendor's headline claim is that it catches exams and CP2000 notices around six months before the notice reaches the client in 95 percent of cases. Whether or not that figure holds in every practice, the underlying point is real: transcript codes post before mail arrives, and a firm watching them gets a head start on an assessment, a lien or a statute change.

Two things distinguish it operationally. It installs on the firm's own machine, network or server and connects directly to the IRS with no vendor server in the middle, which is why the vendor argues no Form 7216 consent is needed. Each licence covers one user and one installation. Pricing is a plain annual list: $749 for a first Executive year, $650 to renew, $249 for three months, and a $125 six-month introductory licence. The resolution form generator covering the 433 series, 9465 and 656, and importantly carrying the IRS National Standards, is a separate $200 a year. The bankruptcy calculator is another $400.

The trade-offs follow from the design. There is no case management, no client portal, no billing and no CRM, so this sits alongside other software rather than replacing it. Local installation means the firm owns the backups, the patching and the machine. There is no published SOC 2, no security page, and the leadership team is two named enrolled agents, so the ordering path is a Formsite order form rather than a checkout. Access needs an e-Services login, an EFIN or delegated-user status under one, a CAF number and taxpayer authorization, and IRS registration for e-Services runs through ID.me. That applies across this category, but here it is the entire dependency.

PitBullTax and IRS Solutions both bundle transcript retrieval into a case platform and will suit a firm that wants one system. THS beats both on the depth of what it pulls and parses, and a good number of resolution specialists run it alongside one of them for exactly that reason. Top-pick is kept, with the caveat that it is top-pick at a job, not at a category: buy it for transcripts and monitoring, and buy the case management somewhere else.