IRS & Enforcement
Audit triggers, enforcement actions, compliance requirements, reporting thresholds, IRS technology changes, and taxpayer rights.
Latest in IRS & Enforcement
The IRS will keep accepting paper checks through 2026 and keep two payment lockboxes open until December 2027, a watchdog says
Two dates frame what the IRS told its inspector general about payments made on paper: calendar 2026 for accepting a paper check, and December 2027...
The Trump administration’s fraud task force says federal worker and retiree health plans stopped or reduced $237.7 million in claims before payment in 2025
The Trump administration’s White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and the Office of Personnel Management credited federal health plans with more than $500 million...
The IRS granted 300,537 paper-check exceptions this filing season, a watchdog found
Treasury’s tax watchdog counted 300,537 exceptions that let taxpayers keep receiving paper refund checks after the IRS began phasing them out, but the figure counts...
The IRS launched a new mobile app that replaces IRS2Go for refund status, payments and transcripts
A new mobile app from the IRS is taking over the tasks its predecessor, IRS2Go, handled for more than a decade: checking a refund or...
Trump’s Treasury chief says working families received more than $325 billion in tax refunds
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee on September 15 that working families received over $325 billion in refunds through Tax Day,...
The Paramount–Warner deal includes five years of guardrails meant to keep cable prices competitive
Paramount Skydance must negotiate carriage fees for its basic cable channels separately from those of Warner Bros. Discovery for five years under a settlement with...
Paramount faces a $30 million penalty for each missed movie under the Warner deal
Paramount Skydance will owe $30 million for every film it fails to release under a court-enforceable settlement with 12 state attorneys general over its acquisition...
Amazon is putting more than $1.5 billion into higher pay for U.S. operations workers
Amazon is putting more than $1.5 billion into higher pay for its U.S. core-operations employees, the company announced on September 16, 2026. The money funds...
The IRS extended drought relief on forced livestock sales to farmers in 49 states and other regions
The IRS has extended drought-related tax relief for farmers and ranchers who sold or exchanged livestock because drought forced the sale, covering 49 states and...
Disaster relief moved some October tax deadlines to November 2, others to February 1
October tax dates do not move as one national block after a disaster. The Internal Revenue Service’s current disaster-relief index shows separate postponements with different...
Paper tax refund checks are gone for most filers, and mailed checks went missing sixteen times as often
The Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced in release IR-2025-94 that paper tax refund checks for individual filers began phasing...
The IRS answered about one call in five this year, with an average wait of 14 minutes
About one in five phone calls placed to the Internal Revenue Service during the 2026 filing season reached a live employee, and callers who did...
The late-payment penalty keeps running after the late-filing penalty stops at five months
The Internal Revenue Service caps its failure-to-file penalty at five months, after which the charge for filing a return late stops growing no matter how...
The IRS free-file and direct-file tools face cuts that narrow how retirees file for free
The Internal Revenue Service’s free, government-run electronic filing tool, Direct File, will not return for the current filing season, according to an email the agency...
The IRS is pursuing 73 million people who never filed, and an unclaimed refund vanishes after three years
The Internal Revenue Service has built an inventory of more than 73 million potential nonfiler cases across five recent tax years, drawn from wage and...
The IRS mailed 1.9 million notices to people whose refunds could not be direct-deposited, giving 30 days to fix it
More than 1.9 million taxpayers this year received an IRS notice informing them that their tax refund could not be paid by direct deposit, a...
The IRS lets taxpayers schedule Direct Pay up to 365 days ahead
The IRS says Direct Pay can be used to schedule a federal tax payment as much as 365 days before the chosen payment date. The...
Estimated-tax payments are not just for self-employed workers
Estimated federal tax payments are often described as a self-employment chore. That description is incomplete. The IRS says they can also matter when income arrives...
Extension filers face an October 15 federal tax-return deadline
Taxpayers who requested an extension for a 2025 federal income-tax return have an October 15, 2026 filing deadline, according to the IRS. The date is...
Gift-tax returns are generally due April 15 after the gift year
A federal gift-tax return is generally due on April 15 of the year after the gift was made. The timing rule is easy to state,...