Claimant, student, and 2026 SSN requirements
50 planned instructional minutes
Education Credits
2026 Identification, Expense Coordination, and Form 8863 Review
Determine the correct claimant and student eligibility, apply the new 2026 identifying-number requirements, and calculate AOTC and Lifetime Learning Credit from reconciled tuition, scholarships, materials, and tuition-program distributions.
- Audience
- Enrolled Agents and CPAs
- Level
- Intermediate
- Practice edition
- TY2026
- Proposed category
- Federal Tax Law
Tax-year and release status
The 2026 SSN rules override older general TIN wording. Prior-year expense and credit facts appear only when needed for a 2026 refund-recapture calculation.
4 live IRS CE hours are proposed, not approved or currently awarded. Provider and program approval, qualified human review, and actual duration evidence are required before a credit-bearing offering. Self-study hours require separate validation. CPA CPE acceptance depends on the applicable board and sponsor rules.
Enrollment will open once course availability, schedules and applicable enrollment terms are confirmed.
Core instruction and reserve applications
Four 50-minute core modules provide 200 planned instructional minutes. Two 30-minute reserve modules bring the library to 260 minutes, exactly 30% additional instruction. Unused reserves do not increase a learner's credit award.
AOTC expenses, phaseout, and refundability
50 planned instructional minutes
Lifetime Learning Credit and student selection
50 planned instructional minutes
Scholarship and tuition-program coordination
50 planned instructional minutes
Permissible scholarship allocation
30 planned instructional minutes
Later refunds and credit recapture
30 planned instructional minutes
Preparation and practice
Working familiarity with Form 1040 and basic income, deduction, and credit concepts is recommended. Six synthetic 2026 issue workpapers support manual-entry practice. They are not complete returns, IRS ATS scenarios, or a certified native software import. No real taxpayer data or live transmission is supplied.
Private instructor resources
The owner-delivered master includes teaching text, worked cases, 18 reviews, and a 26-item final bank for balanced 20-question administrations. Suggested forms overlap; they are not disjoint retests. Full PDFs and answer banks are not publicly hosted. Future learner access requires verified identity and course-specific entitlement enforced server-side.
Course access status