The financial news that actually matters
Taxpayers who hand their financial records to a paid preparer and receive an unsigned return are exposed to every penalty, interest charge, and audit consequence that follows. The IRS placed ghost tax preparers at the top of its 2026 Dirty Dozen list, defining them as paid preparers who prepare a return but refuse to sign…
A taxpayer who owed $10,000 on April 15 and filed an extension without sending a check has already racked up roughly $200 in IRS penalties and interest as of late June 2026. By October 15, that figure will climb to approximately $650, and on a $25,000 balance, the damage tops $1,600. The extended filing deadline…
When the Education Department announced last year that it would hold off on aggressive student loan collections while new repayment options were developed, millions of borrowers in default had reason to think their tax refunds were safe. They were not. The Treasury Department’s Treasury Offset Program, which intercepts federal payments to recover outstanding debts, has…
During the 2025 filing season, the IRS flagged roughly 300,000 tax returns as confirmed identity-theft attempts, according to the agency’s annual Data Book. In a typical case, a thief uses a stolen Social Security number to e-file a fraudulent return and claim someone else’s refund before the real taxpayer even opens their tax software. The…
For the vast majority of American taxpayers, an IRS audit is something that happens to other people. If you earned less than $200,000 and filed a straightforward return, your odds of being examined were roughly 1 in 1,000, according to the IRS’s fiscal year 2023 Data Book, Table 17, the most recent complete edition available…
A wage earner in Dallas who reports $85,000 on a W-2 and claims the standard deduction has, statistically, almost no chance of sitting across from an IRS examiner this year. A hedge-fund partner in Greenwich pulling seven figures through a web of K-1s faces odds roughly eight times higher. That contrast, already stark, is on…
A tax refund of $3,000 can cover two months of rent, a semester of child care, or a car repair that keeps someone employed. For the tens of thousands of filers whose paper refund checks are stolen from mailboxes every filing season, that money doesn’t just vanish once. It vanishes twice: first when a thief…
Your phone buzzes: “IRS Notice: Your tax refund of $3,284.00 is pending. Verify your identity to receive payment.” A blue link sits right below. It looks official. It is completely fake. The IRS has never sent refund notifications by text message, and the agency has stated explicitly that it never will. Every text, email, or…
Millions of Americans paid federal tax penalties during the pandemic years without realizing the IRS may not have had the legal authority to charge them. Now, a court ruling and a ticking deadline have created a narrow window to claim that money back. If you were hit with a failure-to-pay penalty on a federal return…
Roughly 14 million individual taxpayers owed the IRS money after filing their 2024 returns, according to agency data. If you are one of them and you have not arranged a payment plan yet, the cost of waiting is growing every single day. The IRS charges a failure-to-pay penalty of 0.5% of your unpaid balance each…