No, not coffee or tea or sodapop, it’s the Central Authorization File system, IRS’ handy-dandy guide to Power of Attorney (Form 2848) and Tax Information Authorization (Form 8821); in short, the master list of who can speak for taxpayers and who can look at what.

The system will be down from one minute after midnight on December 26, 2012 through and including same time on January 3, 2013. Thus, IRS cannot tell who is authorized to do anything.

If you need transcripts or anything else that requires you to prove your authority, do it NLT 11:59 p.m., Eastern Time on 12/25/12, or else hold your peace until January 3, 2013.

If you have a crash emergency that won’t wait during the De-CAF, IRS has suggested the following: “If you need to contact the IRS for help with a client and you have an established power of authority on file, be prepared to provide a faxed copy of that authorization. Our Customer Service Representatives will not have access to the CAF and will have limited research capability during the outage. New authorizations submitted for this purpose will be forwarded to the CAF for processing. You will not need to re-submit it through the Disclosure Authorization function of e-Services.

“Please contact the Practitioner Priority Service at 866-860-4259 if you have questions.”

Happy Holidays.