Episode 28: IOFM Conference Takeaways: Anxiety, Complexity, and AI

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Welcome to this week's episode of Information Return Intelligence, all about 1099s and information forms in general. I'm Jason Dinason. And this week we want to talk about the IOFM Conference, the spring conference in Orlando that happened last week. So I was there last week. I do all of the 1099 education at IOFM. And so I was at their conference. These sessions are great, and you know what I find most valuable? More so than the teaching. The teaching is great, but just talking to people and listening to their problems and their concerns and the things that they're up against. That helps me as an educator, and it helps me to figure out what people want as far as content. So let's talk about the things that I learned. There's three three big things. One is just generalized anxiety about information reporting. I felt a lot of anxiety in the air as people asked questions or talked about what keeps them up at night. Some of this, in my opinion, is probably just because it seems like there's a lot of tension. But it is in fact a change. And because nothing is ever easy, not all of the thresholds have changed. Royalties is still ten dollars, gross proceeds to an attorney is still six hundred. But it's just one more thing to keep track of. Then you have the fire system. FIRE is shutting down, and Iris will be the only system available starting next filing season. Now, for some folks, that's no big deal because they're already using Iris, or maybe they use a third party for their filing, so it's not really any bother to them. But for people who have direct logins to fire, it means an entirely new system to figure out new file formatting, you have to apply for new transmitter codes. It's just again, one more thing that you have to do. Along those same lines is just the generalized difficulty level of everything keeps increasing. That came up a lot, just how hard it is. You have the regulatory complexities, the uncertainty about what the right answer is. One of the sessions that I led was worker classification, contractor versus employee. And this came up a lot. There were several comments made about it during the session. The IRS has its standards, the DOL has standards, states have another set of standards. And there's a lot of overlap, but there are also a lot of differences, and with all three agencies, there are gray areas and no easy answers. And I always say anyone who thinks that there's no complexity to information reporting, oh, it's just a 1099, check out IOFM's Ask the Expert feature. And we give you snippets of Ask the Expert here on this podcast every now and then. You can see just how mind-bending these things can be. Speaking of IOFM, let's hear from our sponsor, IOFM, the Institute of Finance and Management, Financial Operations Professionals, Accounts Payable, Procurement, Procurement to Pay, Accounts Reivable, Credit and Collections, Order to Cash, whatever your organization calls it, and whatever your role, you're facing mounting pressures to improve performance. Compliance regulations are always changing, and penalties are increasing. Plus, you have threats of fraud and abuse on the rise. And despite all of these challenges, there are very few reliable, independent, and comprehensive places to turn for help. And that's where IOFM comes into play. Join over ten thousand of your peers and become an IOFM member today. Check them out at IOFM.com. And now back to the show. So we're talking this week about the IOFM Spring Conference and the things that I found interesting from the conference. So so far we've talked about anxiety in the air, and just the generalized difficulty level, and people expressing displeasure with how the difficulty level keeps increasing. The third thing was artificial intelligence, AI everywhere you turn, and lots of uncertainty. Some people are afraid, rightfully, of what AI is going to do to this industry. And is it going to put all of us out of a job? Lots of frustration, also, that there are so many software vendors out there touting the latest and greatest AI solution, but yet it's unclear what the software even does. I find that myself when I talk to software vendors who push AI. I'll talk to them, and even after they explain it to me, I still am not sure exactly what it is they do or why anyone should use their software. And I was happy to discover that I'm not the only one who feels this way. That's not just me being an old cynic or something. I hosted as part of this IOFM conference, I was the moderator of a round table with AP professionals. And that came up where it's like they get inundated with these software companies telling them how great everything is with AI, and our software can do this and that, but yet it's like they don't really understand what it is that software does. There's also backlash against the push for AI in so many organizations where you'll have management mandating, you know, we gotta use AI, but they don't even really know what that means or what they want out of it. So those are the three things that I picked up from the IOFM Spring Conference. Generalized anxiety about all of these things, backlash against how difficult everything is, and a lot of uncertainty about artificial intelligence. If you're interested in these topics, which you must be if you're a listener to this podcast, keep following, like and subscribe to this podcast. Check us out on Substack also, where we write companion articles to go along with these podcasts. And consider joining our sponsor, IOFM. They offer great content on information returns and so much more. Check them out at IOFM.com. That'll do it for this week's episode of Information Return Intelligence. I'm Jason Dinason, and we'll talk to you again next week. Dinason Media Ventures.