September 17, 2020

September 16, 2020 | Dale Wade | Senior Solutions Architect, JD Edwards Support 

In March of 2020, any remaining JD Edwards (JDE) releases prior to E1 9.2 and World A9.4 were moved into Oracle’s Sustaining Support. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, Sustaining Support offers little value to customers and excludes key service features like new tax, legal, and regulatory updates. 2020 is an especially painful year to not be receiving these year-end updates: important changes have been made for 1099 year-end reporting and several other forms that require updating. 

In 2019, Oracle announced that it would provide only customers on the Continuous Innovation releases with this critical 1099 update. Oracle representatives see this as yet another reason for customers to finally move to E1 9.2 and World A9.4, and there are no update exceptions for earlier versions, despite the criticality of the form changes to business operations. 

We think otherwise, and this blog outlines how we’ve already been assisting our JD Edwards customers with this critical issue. 

The 2020 1099 Issue Details

Form changes from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are not uncommon. In the case of the 2020 1099, what used to be box 7 on the MISC 1099 for Nonemployee Compensation will be removed and moved onto its own form known as the 1099-NEC (Nonemployee Compensation). Along with this change, many of the other boxes on the MISC form would be moving up into different positions because of the removal of Nonemployee Compensation.  

As soon as these changes were announced in 2019, JDE customers needed to start thinking of what boxes they use on the 1099-MISC form and how to re-arrange system values/settings to get a head start on the system setup. They needed to understand as soon as possible what was in store for the upcoming 1099 processing year and prepare for a new form if they order their pre-printed forms. 

An additional challenge has been that, until this week, everyone was still waiting on one piece of the information from the IRS. Customers who file 250 or more 1099s, must file electronically, and the IRS releases a Publication 1220 each year to provide the electronic file specifications. This publication was released on 9/15/20. 

A Proactive Response for Our Customers

The Spinnaker Support Global Tax and Regulatory Compliance (GTRC) tracks these types of form changes and covers 102 jurisdictions and economic blocks and for a variety of accounting standards (e.g., US, UK, IFRs). Working in tandem with GTRC, our JDE engineering team sent out an early communication back in December of 2019 to notify our customers of the big change coming to the 2020 1099s. 

We understand the impact this will have on our customer’s year-end reporting, and we’ve been actively monitoring the situation. But waiting on the publication hasn’t held us back from already starting the updates for our customers. 

With so many program changes, we opted to start early this year. This involved reaching out directly to each customer to gather requirements for our 1099 subject matter experts (SME) and developers. Our specialists have been working together on internal functional/technical requirements documentation related to the software. Scoping is followed by our development, testing, and documentation delivery. 

For those customers that require forms or forms and electronic files, we’ve already begun delivering the form changes, despite knowing that we’ll have a follow up later to make the necessary file changes for those customers with the requirement.  

This level of proactive communication and dedication to GTRC updates represents what many of our JD Edwards customers like most about our support services. With Oracle (and the IRS), updates can arrive threateningly close to year-end – or not at all if you are on Sustaining Support or self-support. Spinnaker Support not only personalizes the year-end tax process for each customer, we deliver precise updates before you need them, regardless of product version. Anticipating your needs and delivering responsive support is a core tenet of our service. 

Contact Us for Additional Information

Our award-winning support team has the most combined experience in the industry. If you’re concerned about your year-end JD Edwards processing needs in regards to the 1099 form or other changes we’ll announce in October, reach out to us. There is still plenty of time, and we’re glad to help.