Well, I had a record that I had paid the university, just not the receipt that said that the payment was for tuition and not parking.
I generally do keep paper records. For this case, both the university and a tax accountant told me what I had submitted is all that is needed. There's a reason the university gives you a tax form every year. Saying I should keep more records is like the IRS coming to you and not accepting your employer's W-2 form and wanting additional proof of your wages. Did you happen to save your biweekly payslips?
For standard deductions/credits (of which education is a common one), I do think it is the responsibility of the IRS to come up with a simple system to show it, like they already do for the W-2. The tax statement the university provides should suffice - what else is it for?
As for professionalism: They were calm and courteous, but I do not think being told "If you can show X it will be sufficient", and then not accepting X when I provide it to them is professional. This happened twice for the education credit issue. X wasn't some vague general idea, but a very specific document. They literally said "If you can show a bank statement showing payments to the university that will be enough" and then refused to accept it when I provided it to them (switching to "Yes, but how do we know it wasn't for parking?"). It should have been obvious at the outset that the bank statement would not have this information.
I generally do keep paper records. For this case, both the university and a tax accountant told me what I had submitted is all that is needed. There's a reason the university gives you a tax form every year. Saying I should keep more records is like the IRS coming to you and not accepting your employer's W-2 form and wanting additional proof of your wages. Did you happen to save your biweekly payslips?
For standard deductions/credits (of which education is a common one), I do think it is the responsibility of the IRS to come up with a simple system to show it, like they already do for the W-2. The tax statement the university provides should suffice - what else is it for?
As for professionalism: They were calm and courteous, but I do not think being told "If you can show X it will be sufficient", and then not accepting X when I provide it to them is professional. This happened twice for the education credit issue. X wasn't some vague general idea, but a very specific document. They literally said "If you can show a bank statement showing payments to the university that will be enough" and then refused to accept it when I provided it to them (switching to "Yes, but how do we know it wasn't for parking?"). It should have been obvious at the outset that the bank statement would not have this information.