LinkLearn provides training and certification for volunteer tax preparers across the US. They needed to extend their reach to accomodate a learning audience in excess of 10,000 simultaneous users, especially during the tax season. Understandably, LinkLearn’s busiest time of the year typically coincides with the US Tax Season, which begins in October and runs through the month of April. LinkLearn reaches its absolute busiest peak from February to April, as income tax returns are prepared and filed. To accommodate their traffic, LinkLearn needed a customized LMS: a scaleable system that could handle 10,000 simultaneous users and above… without crashing. In addition to the increased number of users, legal requirements meant that a historcial and archival component was absolutely necessary. Further, the LMS had to incorporate certification capablities for the users. At the time, LinkLearn’s existing system was a barrier to successful and effective implementation: it was inefficient and ill equipped to handle the demand for the sheer number of tax preparers during the tax season. Knowledge testing was also challenging, because it required radomly-selected questions as well as questions that had to be asked in a specific sequence. All the aforementioned challenges made archiving difficult at best, which presented a real problem if and when a tax audit was ordered.

LinkLearn has used KMI’s Custom LMS with great success since 2012. In 2013, LinkLearn trained and certified over 65,000 volunteers. In 2019, that number had grown to over 84,000. Despite the pandemic in 2020, the number of users stayed high at over 63,000. KMI continues to serve LinkLearn as they strive to support volunteers in providing certified tax services to needful people across the US throughout the year and especially during the busy tax season.