Enroll as a tax professional or reporting agent in IRS e-Services at irs.gov/e-services; registration requires identity proofing via ID.me and takes several days to complete.
Obtain a valid Centralized Authorization File (CAF) number and ensure the taxpayer has filed a valid Form 2848 (Power of Attorney) or Form 8821 (Tax Information Authorization) authorizing your access.
Log in to TDS via the e-Services portal; select the transcript type (Return Transcript, Account Transcript, Record of Account, Wage and Income Transcript, or Verification of Non-Filing) and the tax year.
For programmatic/bulk access, use the IVES Application-to-Application (A2A) interface rather than the web UI — submit XML requests to the IVES secure mailbox and poll for transcript delivery to your designated secure mailbox.
Parse the returned transcript PDF or structured data for the requested tax year fields; the modernized TDS (deployed in 2024-2025) supports additional form types including 1041 and select 990-series returns.
Retain access logs and CAF authorization records for audit purposes; TDS access without valid taxpayer authorization is a federal offense.
Known gotchas
TDS web UI access is manual and session-based; for automated/bulk transcript retrieval, the IVES A2A channel is the appropriate integration path and requires separate IVES program enrollment.
CAF processing backlogs can delay authorization recognition in TDS by weeks; file authorizations well in advance of the transcript need date.
Not all tax form types are available as structured transcripts yet — the IRS is rolling out additional form types (1120-series, excise, Form 706 series) in phases through 2025-2026; check the TDS release notes for current availability.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp