The Internal Revenue Service announced that starting with next year’s tax filing season it will no longer provide tax preparers and associated financial institutions with the debt indicator, which is used to facilitate refund anticipation loans, or RALs. “We no longer see a need for the debt indicator in a world where we can process a tax return and deliver a refund in 10 days,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said. RALs are loans secured by a taxpayer’s anticipated tax refund. Currently, tax preparers who electronically submit a client’s tax return receive in the acknowledgment file an indication of whether an individual taxpayer will have any portion of the refund offset for delinquent tax or other debts, such as unpaid child support or delinquent federally funded student loans. This acknowledgment is known as the debt indicator, and is used as an underwriting tool for RALs.