Split Agent Refund Process

Last Updated September 5, 2006

Dallas County needs to compare a refund file generated at the tax office to a tax agent file generated by the agents.  The refunds due to the accounts on the agents file must be directed to the agents rather than the individual taxpayers.  TaxLedge allows this to happen via the processes described below.

A client preference, TCS_TAX_AGENT_SPLIT, must be set to Y for this process to work correctly.  Contact ACT for assistance with this as is must be set inside TaxLedge, not the Tax Collection System.

I. The UGSA system at Dallas County generates a refund file and loads it into the refund work table in TaxLedge on a nightly basis.

II.  Load the agent file to Taxledge.  This file should already be on the ACT 7 server, but not in TaxLedge.

  1. On TaxLedge’s Main Menu bar, select Batch Menu, then select Load Tax Agent File.
  2. Enter your tax office's Client ID.
  3. Enter the name of the tax agent file (case sensitive, with extension).
  4. Click Submit Job.
  5. Click OK on the "OK to Submit Job" pop-up screen.
  6. To view the log file, see Previewing and Printing Reports.  The log file indicates the number of accounts that were loaded.
  7. Note the batch sequence no. generated when the file was loaded. You need it for the next part of the process.

III. Compare the agent file to the refund file and split the refunds that should be directed to agents into separate files, with one file per agent.  Each agent has a fiduciary number.

  1. On TaxLedge’s Main Menu bar, select Reports, then select Load Summary Report.
  2. Enter the Deposit Date Range you want for the data on the report.
  3. Click on the Record Type drop-down menu and choose Refund Batches Available.
  4. Enter the Number of Copies you need.
  5. Click Print.  This report lists the refund batches that have not yet been loaded into the TaxLedge Refund screen.  The batch sequence number from step 7 above should be listed there.
  6. On TaxLedge’s Main Menu bar, select Batch Menu, then select Split Agent Refund Process.
  7. Enter your tax office's Client ID.
  8. Enter the Batch Request Seq. No. generated when you loaded the agent file.
  9. In the Process Option field, enter E for edit or U for update.  Edit mode will produces a report showing the account numbers, owner number, and refund amounts listed for each agent (fiduciary).  The refunds going to taxpayers rather than agents are listed at the end.  Each agent represents a different file, split from the original agent file.

Update mode produces the same report, but adds the batch sequence number for each agent. The agent file is split into separate files for each agent.  The non-agent refunds are put into a file also. Each of these split files has a different batch number than the original agent or refund ones. If the load Summary report is run again, the new batch numbers can be seen.

If the client preference TCS_TAX_AGENT_SPLIT is set to N, the file is not split and the batch sequence umbers are not added to the report produced in Update mode.

  1. Process the refund batches as usual in TaxLedge. Each refund batch must be loaded separately, but all of them must be processed through the Check Writer before any of them can be posted back.  The postback process creates a file for each of the split batch files and places it in the FTP_DALLAS_MORTGAGE directory. A nightly process run by Dallas County on the UGSA server takes these files and combines them into one again.