☛ Note: Beginning in calendar year 2004 for Tax Year 2003, IRS/MCC will no longer…

Cartridges (QIC).

.01 In most instances, IRS/MCC can process tape cartridges that meet the following specifications:

(a) General

(1) Must meet American National Standard Institute (ANSI) standards, and have the following characteristics:

• Created from an AS400 operating system only.

• Mode will be full function.

• Compressed data is not acceptable.

• Either EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) or ASCII (American Standard Coded Information Interchange) may be used. However, IRS/MCC encourages the use of EBCDIC. This information must appear on the external media label affixed to the cartridge.

• A file may consist of more than one cartridge; however, no more than 250,000 documents may be transmitted per file or per cartridge. The filename, for example, IRSTAX, will contain a three digit extension. The extension will indicate the sequence of the cartridge within the file (e.g., 1 of 3, 2 of 3, and 3 of 3 will appear in the header label as IRSTAX.001, IRSTAX.002, and IRSTAX.003 on each cartridge of the file). The Transmitter “T” Record must only appear on the first cartridge. The End of Transmission “F” Record should be placed only on the last cartridge for files containing multiple cartridges. (2) The tape cartridge records defined in this Revenue Procedure may be blocked subject to the following:

• A block must not exceed 32,250 tape positions.

• If the use of blocked records would result in a short block, the last block of the file may be filled with 9s or truncated.

• All records, except the header and trailer labels, may be blocked or unblocked. A record may not contain any control fields or block descriptor fields which describe the length of the block or the logical records within the block. The number of logical records within a block (the blocking factor) must be constant in every block with the exception of the last block which may be shorter (see above). The block length must be evenly divisible by 750.

June 24, 2002 1234 2002–25 I.R.B.

• Various COPY commands have been successful; however, the SAVE OBJECT COMMAND is not acceptable.

• Extraneous data following the “F” Record will result in IRS/MCC requesting a replacement file. Therefore, IRS/MCC encourages transmitters to use a blank tape cartridge, rather than used cartridges, in the preparation of data when submitting information returns.

• Records may not span blocks.

• No more than 250,000 documents per cartridge and per file. (3) For faster processing, IRS/MCC encourages transmitters to use header labeled cartridges. Filers should use IRSTAX as

a filename. (4) For the purposes of this Revenue Procedure, the following must be used:

Tape Mark:

• Signifies the physical end of the recording on tape.

• For even parity, use BCD configuration 001111 (8421).

• May follow the header label and precede and/or follow the trailer label. (5) IRS/MCC can only read one data file on a tape. A data file is a group of records which may or may not begin with a

tapemark, but must end with a trailer label. Any data beyond the trailer label cannot be read by IRS programs. (b) 8mm cartridge specifications

(1) 8mm (.315-inch) tape cartridges will be 2½-inch by 3¾-inch. (2) These are the only 8mm tape cartridges IRS/MCC can accept:

Tracks Density Capacity

1 20 (43245 BPI) 2.3 Gb

1 21 (45434 BPI) 5 Gb