If you're responsible for 1099 reporting, vendor records, revenue owner payments, or year-end filing preparation, you've probably heard that the IRS is retiring the FIRE system. Most accounting teams see that headline and think, "Okay, another filing change."
But the transition from FIRE to IRIS is more than simply adjusting to a new filing portal. It has implications for your data quality, reporting workflows, and year-end preparation. And like most compliance changes, the teams that start early tend to have a smooth transition. The ones that wait until filing season is already underway are usually the ones scrambling to fix things that could have been caught months earlier. The good news? There's still time to get ahead of it.
The IRS plans to retire the Filing Information Returns Electronically (FIRE) system and move filers to the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) beginning with Filing Season 2027.
IRIS is the IRS's modernized platform for filing information returns electronically. The filing destination is changing, but here's what I want accounting teams to focus on: the work that determines your filing season success happens long before you ever submit a return.
That's why I'd start looking at your readiness now and resist the urge to treat IRIS as a problem for later.
In our industry, information reporting is rarely a simple year-end task. The same teams responsible for filing are often managing thousands of vendors, royalty owners, working interest owners, and other payees all year long. A missing TIN, an outdated address, a duplicate record, an incomplete setup. On any given day, those feel minor. But they have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment, and right when filing deadlines are bearing down on you.
That's why I don't look at the FIRE-to-IRIS transition as just a compliance project. I look at it as a chance to check the health of your reporting process.
A few questions I'd be asking right now:
In my experience, knowing where you stand on these questions, and putting a plan in place to close any gaps, is what sets a team up for a smooth filing season. When your data is clean and your processes are solid, the right technology can do what it does best, take the heavy lifting off your team and make filing far less painful.
I'll walk through each of these in detail during my IRIS-prep webinar on August 27, but here's where I'd start.
A lot of organizations assume their existing FIRE credentials will just carry over. They won't. IRIS has its own access process, and if you haven't started that conversation yet, that's the first thing I'd put on the list.
Most filing headaches don't start with the filing system. They start with unclear processes. Take an honest look at how information moves through your organization, from vendor setup and revenue owner maintenance all the way through year-end review and filing.
If data cleanup only happens during year-end reporting, you're making filing season harder than it needs to be. Vendor and owner records, TIN accuracy, duplicate payees, addresses, entity classifications. Clean those up now, and future-you will be grateful.
This transition affects more than your tax personnel. Accounting, accounts payable, revenue accounting, vendor maintenance. They all touch the information that ends up on those filings. The sooner everyone understands what's changing, the smoother this goes.
Want the full walkthrough of each of these? That's exactly what we'll cover (and more) on August 27. Save your seat.
The biggest mistake I see every year? Waiting until year-end reporting is already underway to think about readiness. By then, you're juggling close, deadlines, audit requests, and filing prep all at once. It's the worst possible time to discover a problem. The teams with the smoothest filing seasons are the ones that treat readiness as a year-round habit, not a year-end fire drill. That's exactly how I think about the move to IRIS.
At PakEnergy, we're actively building IRIS support into PakEnergy Accounting, and just as importantly, we're helping customers evaluate their current processes, spot readiness gaps, and prepare before filing season pressure hits.
Technology matters. But in my experience, successful transitions almost always start with good processes and reliable data. The sooner you start looking at both, the more confident you'll be when it's time to file through IRIS.
The teams that will have the smoothest transition to IRIS won't be the ones scrambling in late 2026. They'll be the ones asking the right questions today.
If you'd like a practical walkthrough of what the FIRE retirement really means, what changes with IRIS, and what you should be doing now, come join me for Don't Get Burned When FIRE Retires, my essential IRIS primer for oil and gas teams. We'll get into key dates, filing considerations, the readiness gaps I see most often, and the practical steps that'll help you walk into filing season with confidence.
Reserve your spot today and get ahead of the transition before the pressure begins.
Elizabeth “Beth” A. Hutton, CFE serves as Product Director for PakEnergy Accounting's upstream software, where she brings deep oil and gas accounting and technology expertise to the design of new capabilities and the oversight of product road mapping, integrations, and implementations. With a strong command of state, local, and federal tax requirements, regulatory compliance, and process optimization, Beth partners directly with customers to streamline their operations, strengthen their financial workflows, and sharpen their risk management practices. She stays ahead of the evolving regulatory landscape and industry best practices to continually enhance the PakEnergy Accounting platform and help teams work smarter. A Certified Fraud Examiner with a Master of Science in Forensic Accounting, Beth is a frequent industry speaker and an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the Council of Petroleum Accountants Societies.