The financial news that actually matters
A taxpayer who owed $50,000 on a late 2021 return and paid the bill 12 months later would have been hit with roughly $3,000 in failure-to-pay penalties alone. The IRS announced relief for exactly that kind of charge back in January 2024, and millions of people got automatic refunds. But not everyone did. If you…
A taxpayer who paid a $2,400 failure-to-file penalty in August 2024 has until roughly August 2026 to claim a refund. But someone who paid a similar penalty in June 2024 faces a deadline that lands in mid-July 2026, barely two months from now. And once that window closes, the IRS keeps the money for good,…
Trump wants to suspend the 18.4-cent federal gas tax – but the math shows families would save just $35 over five months Fill up a midsize sedan once a week from June through October, and President Donald Trump’s proposed federal gas tax holiday would save your household about $35. Not per month. Total. That figure…
A small furniture importer in North Carolina paid roughly $14,000 in emergency tariff duties on three container shipments last year. When the federal government opened a new refund portal in late April 2026, she expected something like filing a tax return online. Instead, she found a system buried inside the same electronic trade platform that…
The first wave of federal tariff refund checks began landing in importer accounts this week, part of a roughly $166 billion repayment effort that ranks among the largest customs reversals in U.S. history. The money, collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and now being returned with interest, is flowing exclusively to the companies…
Shoppers who paid inflated prices on imported goods last year want their cut of the refund. In a string of class-action lawsuits filed in federal courts in early 2026, consumers have targeted Costco, Nintendo, and Temu, arguing that these companies raised retail prices to cover tariff costs, then stood to pocket billions in government refunds…
A taxpayer who filed a late 2021 return on a $15,000 balance could have been hit with more than $4,000 in combined IRS penalties. If a federal court ruling from 2024 holds up, that money never should have been charged, and the taxpayer can ask for it back. But the clock is running out: the…
Consider a self-employed taxpayer who owed $10,000 in federal taxes during 2021 and was charged failure-to-pay penalties for 18 months while a COVID-19 deadline extension was technically in effect. That taxpayer may have accumulated roughly $900 in penalties plus daily compounding interest, money the IRS arguably should never have collected. Multiply that across tens of…
Somewhere in the IRS’s records, there is a line item showing a penalty or interest charge you paid during the pandemic. Maybe it was a late-filing penalty from 2020, when your accountant’s office was closed and the mail felt unreliable. Maybe it was interest that piled up on a balance you could not pay while…
When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs in February 2026, General Motors began preparing to collect what public reporting has estimated at roughly $500 million in refunded duties. So did more than 330,000 other importers that had paid levies on everything from Chinese-made toys and power tools to European auto parts and Vietnamese…