The return is due and you have never seen the Service's acceptance letter. That is common, and it has a fix. Owners keep the election form they mailed. The reply from the Service is another document, and the return waits on that reply.
Ask about the replyThe election form is the page the company signed to ask for S corporation treatment. A careful owner keeps a copy with the formation papers, and the copy in the cabinet is still only the outbound form. It shows the date you signed, the year you asked the election to start, and who signed. It does not show that the Service agreed.
People bring that copy to a first call and call it acceptance. We understand the hope. The form was sent in good faith, often years ago, and nothing in the cabinet says it was rejected. Silence after mailing is not a reply. A stamp from your own scanner is not a reply. We ask for the inbound paper before we prepare the return as an S corporation.
The reply is correspondence from the Service about that election. It may be short. It may name the company, the year, and the fact that the election was accepted. When you have it, we want a copy in the same place as the signed form, and we want the date readable. That pair, the form you sent and the reply they sent, is the record.
If the reply is a refusal or a notice that the election did not take, that is also a record, and it changes the return. We would rather see a refusal than guess. Bring it. We will not talk you into treating a refused election as if the reply had been friendly.
Say so on the note. We look at what you do have, including any transcript pages you already ordered, and we tell you whether the trail is enough to prepare or whether the next step is to ask the Service through the ordinary channel. We do not backdate a story to make a lender comfortable.
The form you signed can sit for years in a folder above the kitchen table, and the ink still looks official because it is yours. A long memory in a cabinet is a weak stand-in for a letter that came back from the Service. We still want that reply. A form you kept has a long memory too. Bring the inbound paper when you have it, and say so in the note when you do not. Silence after mailing is the gap we will not decorate.
We match the year on the form to the year you have been filing. We ask whether every owner consented. We ask whether the company has been filing Form 1120-S on the strength of that copy alone. If the answer is yes, the job may be to confirm acceptance before the next return, not to invent a new election on the spot.
The monthly close still matters. An accepted election does not close the bank account for you. The month still has to match the bank, payday stays with a provider you approve, and the return waits until that match is real. The reply is the gate in front of that work, not a substitute for it.
Say whether the Service wrote back, whether you only kept the form you sent, or whether both are missing. Add the year printed on the page when you can see it.