What's Up: Intuit's New Verification Policy for ProAdvisor Profiles

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Sorry folks, I am preempting our regular Monday feature for this important news.

Last week Intuit began implementing an apparently new policy requiring ProAdvisors to verify their identity in order to have their ProAdvisor Profile posted on the Find-A-ProAdvisor website.  While an Intuit spokesperson told Insightful Accountant that Intuit “communicated the new process for publishing their (ProAdvisor) Profiles through in-product messaging, email and social media,” none of the ProAdvisors we spoke with saw any such communications until after their Profiles had been removed (Intuit refers to it as ‘unpublished’) from the Find-A-ProAdvisor website.

After hearing from several ProAdvisors asking if Insightful Accountant was aware of ‘what was going on’, I happened to check my own profile and found that it was also missing from the list of ProAdvisors in the Oklahoma City Metro Area.  When I logged-in to the ProAdvisor tab of QuickBooks Online-Accountant, and clicked on the profile page, I was confronted with this message:

When I clicked on the blue 'Get started' link, the following 'Confirm Your Profile' box opened.

ProAdvisors are advised that Intuit must ‘verify their eligibility to participate in the program.’ I thought a ‘paid membership’ entitled me to participate in the ProAdvisor Program, and that my ‘earned certification’ entitled me to be listed on the Find-A-ProAdvisor website. 

Apparently, although this was not confirmed, someone must be posting false information within their ProAdvisor Profile such that now we must prove who we say we are by submitting either a Driver’s License, State-issued Identification card with address, or Passport page with photo and identification information.  The spokesperson for Intuit confirmed to me that Intuit would purge the identification documents within 14 days after verification.

While it would seem that purchasing a ProAdvisor Membership using a credit-card with your name on it, and the various security code and zip code validations that take place as part of the payment process would be sufficient identity verification, I guess, in order to be completely fair to the numerous ProAdvisors who get ‘free’ status because they are QuickBooks Online only ProAdvisors, Intuit has decided we all need to go through this new process.

When I first opened the ‘Confirm Your Profile’ box, I decided I would wait until I found out more about the process before uploading the requested information.  I then sent an email to some Intuit personnel asking about the new verification policy. 

While waiting for a formal Intuit response to my inquiry, I received the email (below) from the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Team advising that I needed to ‘confirm my Intuit QuickBooks Profile.’  Apparently, Intuit is sending out the advisory emails, it just seems they are going out after your profile is removed from the directory. 

In my attempt to clarify Intuit’s efforts to notify ProAdvisors, Intuit’s spokesperson subsequently told me, “In terms of sharing in advance what we planned to do, it’s a delicate balance. Sharing information in advance unfortunately would have provided insight into the process that those who weren’t eligible could have possibly leveraged to remain on the site. We communicated in-product immediately to those ProAdvisors whose profiles were temporarily not visible on the site. We followed this up as soon as possible with email and social media.”

I guess we here at Insightful Accountant are ‘letting the cat out of the bag to the countless numbers of ProAdvisors who haven’t already experienced this issue, but since this topic is hot across many ProAdvisor social media channels anyway, we are going to tell you what we can because we believe you have the right to know.

So, back to my own situation. Between the time I first started my investigation and when I completed my own verification submission I heard that another ProAdvisor actually had their verification rejected because their ProAdvisor Profile address did not match the address on their identification. 

Laura Lincoln, a long-standing ProAdvisor based in Massachusetts, uses her work address on her ProAdvisor Profile, but her identification has her home address on it.  I would venture to guess that Laura Lincoln is not the only ProAdvisor who uses their work address in their Profile.

Of course, most identifications are going to be issued to the holder’s home address since, at least in my own state of Oklahoma, your Driver’s License must contain your home address. The same is true of U.S. Passports.

In response to the message below appearing in her profile, telling Laura to make changes to her address which couldn’t be verified, she attempted to change her profile address to match her identification. 

Laura confirmed to me that she has been unable to make any ‘saved changes’ to her profile despite Intuit's instruction to do so. But, every time Laura attempts to make a change in her Profile address, as soon as she tries to save the change her profile simply reverts to what it was before the change. According to the spokesperson for Intuit what Laura was informed to do “is not correct.”

After hearing about Laura’s dilemma, I returned to my own Profile verification and prior to submitting my identification, I changed my First Name to exclude the “Bill” nickname so that it would match my Driver's License, and then I changed my address to exactly match the address on my identification right down to the zip+4 code. 

Sure enough, about 24-hours later I got the following email notifying me that Intuit was able to ‘confirm my profile information’ based upon my submitted information to verify my eligibility.

Within 24-hours of my receiving the ‘profile information confirmed’ email, my ProAdvisor Profile was once again appearing on the Find-A-ProAdvisor website. So, the process does seem to work if everything is an exact match between your Profile listing and your submitted Identification. Furthermore, I guess I was lucky since much of this process took only about 2 days over the weekend, even though according to Intuit, “they estimate the entire verification process, from submission to publishing of a profile, to be up to 5 business days.”

With regard to Laura Lincoln, her profile is apparently stuck in some kind of a Hofstadter-Moebius loop, unable to be changed, unable to be verified, unable to be published. Hopefully Intuit technical support can get this problem resolved quickly, not only for Laura, but for any other ProAdvisors having problems with this new process.

I do have one follow-up question though...how can it be that a ProAdvisor Profile listed within the Oklahoma City metro area containing only the first name of a person with ‘at business name’ (the name of a business) made it past this new validation process? What possible identification could be submitted to meet that verification?

If you are also experiencing a problem with getting verified under the new process please post a comment below; however, DO NOT include any personal information (we don't want your Driver's license, state ID, Passport, Birth Certificate, fingerprint card, 'blood oath' or any such things), simply your story.