Customer Contacts Are Used To Trigger Letters

In order to send a letter to a taxpayer, a customer contact must be created for the taxpayer. These types of customer contacts reference a customer contact type that, in turn, references a letter template. The letter template controls the type of information that is merged into the "form letter" and how the letter is physically produced. Refer to Letter Printing for more information about letter templates and how letters are physically produced.

Customer contacts that trigger letters can be produced by any of the method described under How Customer Contacts Are Created. While a user can create this type of customer contact (e.g., if a taxpayer requests a form to sign-up for automatic payment), the primary sources of customer contacts that trigger letters are via system events and algorithms. Your implementation team can introduce plug-in algorithms to create a customer contact when certain events take place. If the created customer contact references a letter template, a letter will be triggered. Because the number and type of plug-ins can be customized for your implementation, we cannot provide a concise list of all such algorithms.

Some events that trigger the creation of letters may also get canceled and related algorithms may try to suppress the letter from being printed as a result. If the letter was already extracted prior to the attempt to suppress, there is no ability for the application to prevent printing. However, the customer contact page will still indicate for audit purposes that suppression of printing was attempted. The customer contact maintenance page will indicate in the letter information string whether or not the letter was suppressed or attempted to be suppressed. There is also a suppression reason captured as a characteristic.

Refer to Suppressing Letters for more information.