The financial news that actually matters
Covers tax laws, government policies, fiscal changes, and financial regulations. It explains how policy decisions affect personal income, businesses, and the economy.
Treasury and the IRS have published the first regulations for the new federal scholarship tax credit, and the temporary set becomes legally effective on Dec. 1, 2026. Individual taxpayers may claim up to $1,700 a year, and married couples filing jointly up to $3,400 a year, for cash gifts to approved scholarship-granting organizations. The credit…
Customs and Border Protection is working through more than 53 million import entry summaries to strip out tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled unlawful in February. The agency puts the affected duties at an estimated $166 billion. The refunds run through a court-ordered process that began in the spring and is still being built out,…
An executive order signed September 29, 2026 directs federal agencies to bring online services that serve more than 100,000 users in a 12-month period into America.gov, a single entry point that uses Login.gov to sign people in. IRS tax filing is excluded from the order, along with national-security-sensitive services of the Department of War and…
The White House said on September 29, 2026 that Vice President JD Vance’s Fraud Task Force has uncovered more than $260 billion in fraud since January 2025. The figure appears in a fact sheet released with an executive order that creates a single online entry point for federal services called America.gov. It is the administration’s…
A second block of 100,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings became eligible for entry at the in-quota duty on October 1, the middle of three monthly windows that together add 300,000 metric tons to the 2026 quota. The aim, stated in the August 26 proclamation, is cheaper ground beef at the grocery store, a…
Imported solar modules and cells will carry a minimum import price from December 4, set by a presidential proclamation that also puts a 15 percent duty on polysilicon derivatives. Until then, a Commerce Department rule keeps newly registered importers from rushing in material ahead of the date, capping polysilicon at 12 kilograms a week for…
The IRS will charge $76 for an estate tax closing letter on any request it receives after October 26, 2026, up from $56, under a final Treasury and IRS regulation published in the Federal Register on September 25. The $20 increase is a 35.7 percent jump, and it applies per request, so an executor weighing…
The qualified overtime deduction created by the 2025 tax law begins to shrink once a taxpayer’s modified adjusted gross income passes $150,000, or $300,000 on a joint return, according to the IRS’s Fact Sheet FS-2026-13. The same fact sheet limits the deduction to the premium portion of overtime pay that federal wage law requires, which…
Shares given to a child’s Trump Account come with a sale restriction attached. Under temporary Treasury regulations in effect since September 30, qualified stock placed in an account may not be sold before the earlier of two dates: five years after the contribution, or the end of the child’s growth period, which closes on December…
Temporary Treasury regulations published on September 30 let a state, a tribal government or a 501(c)(3) charity put the same amount into every Trump Account in a defined group of at least 5,000 children. The rules, issued as Treasury Decision 10056, took effect the day they appeared and remain in force through September 30, 2029….