Providing students a better experience finding their 1098T

Filing taxes can be complicated, time-consuming, and stressful. The same can be said for preparing tax documents for nearly 20,000 students, which Yale does annually in January.

This year Yale ITS and Accounts Receivable (AR) worked together within a very short time-frame to move the 1098T web display for students out of Banner Student Self-Service and the print and mailing to YalePay. This is familiar technology to students and their designees since they already used YalePay to view account statements and pay bills.

This project kicked off in November 2021, with a very aggressive timeline to be in production before January 25, 2022. The Yale ITS and AR teams worked with the YalePay vendor, Flywire, to stand up a data integration to share 1098T tax data for web display and create a data file to be sent to a third-party vendor to print and mail 1098T documents. Flywire had not done this with very many universities, and never with one using Banner. While challenging, all parties stepped up and put in many extra hours to successfully launch the web display ahead of schedule in early January and have the printed and mailed forms out on time for the end of January.

Moving this to Flywire going forward means several Oracle Reports, and dated technology ITS will deprecate by November 2022 can be decommissioned. Custom code allowing the 1098T to be displayed in Banner Student Self-Service can be decommissioned. Yale is no longer tasked itself with printing and mailing forms to students and students and their designees have a better experience finding the 1098T in the same location they view their account statement and pay bills.