The Internal Revenue Service has resurrected a form that hasn’t been used since the early 1980s, Form 1099-NEC, Nonemployee Compensation, with a draft version available for preview on its website.

Since 1983, the IRS has required businesses to instead file Form 1099-MISC for contract workers and freelancers. The revival of Form 1099-NEC is part of an effort mandated by Congress in the PATH Act of 2015 to require businesses to file information returns about any non-employee compensation by Jan. 31 of each year. However, there were problems with the IRS’s processing systems because there was still a March 31 due date for any Form 1099-MISC that didn’t contain non-employee compensation.

“To make matters worse, tax analysts reported in March that the IRS computers were unable to apply two different due dates to a batch of Forms 1099-MISC submitted,” wrote Ed Zollars of Kaplan Financial Education in his Current Federal Tax Developments blog. “So a single Form 1099-MISC in a batch submitted after January 31 that had an entry in box 7 for non-employee compensation on it would cause a notice to be issued charging late payment fees on every Form 1099-MISC submitted.”

Zollars noted that the new Form 1099-NEC contains an extra box that wasn’t on the form the last time the IRS released it in 1982 for state identifying information.

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