The financial news that actually matters
Explains tax audits, IRS enforcement actions, penalties, compliance rules, and legal financial obligations. It helps readers understand risk areas and how to respond to audits.
More than 330,000 importers are waiting on roughly $166 billion in tariff refunds, and a federal judge has now demanded that the Customs and Border Protection commissioner appear in court Tuesday to explain exactly when those payments will arrive. The order escalates a legal standoff over refunds tied to Trump-era tariffs that the U.S. Supreme…
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…
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…
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…
Roughly 830,000 tax filers are waiting for refunds the IRS will not release, and most of them may not understand why. The money is not lost or denied. It is sitting in a federal holding pattern because those returns did not include direct deposit information, and under a policy that took effect last fall, the…