By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)
There’s a new online portal for Iowans to pay next year’s state income taxes. It’s called GovconnectIowa.
“That’s where people can go and have access to their individual tax information,” says Iowa Department of Revenue director Mary Mosiman.
Iowans can make estimated state income tax payments up to a year in advance through the new portal. “A continual request from not only taxpayers, but tax professionals,” Mosiman says, “so that’s now a live feature on our GovConnectIowa portal.”
Taxpayers with questions may also send a message through the portal to the Iowa Department of Revenue. “You can send secure messaging to the department and we can work directly with you that way,” Mosiman says. “We’re not taking away any of our other customer service features. We will still have our call center and you can still send emails through out website.”
GovConnectIowa replaces what was called the “e-file and pay” system. Mosiman is urging Iowans who file a tax return as an individual and Iowans who are married and file a joint state income tax return to check out the portal. “We strongly recommend that they initiate a GovConnectIowa or a portal account so they can see tax history, they can see payment history, they can make tax payments,” Mosiman says.
The portal is part of a five year plan to modernize the state system for handling all taxes paid to the state. State sales taxes and corporate income taxes are now part of the updated system. “The reason we are doing this is because quite frankly prior to 2021 Iowa had an aging, unsustainable — we called it a legacy system,” Mosiman says.
There had been over 20 stand-alone computer systems for each of the major taxes paid to the State of Iowa. It cost $18 million a year to maintain those networks. “And now we are an integrated tax system, so we can easily see all the tax types for an individual taxpayer in basically one system,” Mosiman says.
Next year, state tax distributions to local governments will shift to the centralized system, In the final year of the upgrade, license fees and other payments to the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division will be included. The agency is the state wholesaler to more than two-thousand privately-owned businesses in Iowa.
