Households that paid a tax bill when they filed in mid-April 2025 were not supposed to hear from the IRS again about that balance. For 28,929 taxpayers, a notice arrived anyway, saying the payment had not been received. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the agency’s independent watchdog, documented the mistake in a report issued in September 2026.
What TIGTA counted in report 2026-108-054
The finding sits inside TIGTA report 2026-108-054, titled “The IRS Is Making Payments Easier, but Processing Can Be Improved”. In the report’s words, “28,929 taxpayers were sent notices in error showing that their payments were not received and that they needed to make a payment.” The report ties the problem to the closing days of the 2025 filing season, when more than 8 million taxpayers filed returns with payments between April 15 and April 18, 2025.
Measured against that group, 28,929 is well under half of one percent. It is still a large number of households, each holding a letter that appeared to say a payment had vanished. The report as read does not identify the notice by its code number, so this article does not either.
A website note in June 2025 was the fix
According to the report, “in June 2025, the IRS added a statement on its website advising them to ignore the balance due notice or any interest and penalties if they had already sent in their tax payment.” The correction, in other words, took the form of a web statement posted after the notices had gone out. A taxpayer who never visited that page had only the notice to go on.
The 2025 season was not the first time. TIGTA writes that “a similar issue occurred in June 2024 when the IRS sent balance due notices to taxpayers even though payments were made with their Tax Year 2023 tax return.” Two filing seasons in a row, then, produced the same kind of false balance.
Late deposits sit behind a false balance due
The watchdog links the notices to how quickly payments are posted. It writes that depositing payments late “can potentially burden taxpayers by showing a balance due on the account even though a payment was made.” The scale is the report’s headline number for the wider problem: over 39 million payments, totaling $580 billion, took more than 3 days to deposit between calendar years 2018 and 2024, against an IRS policy of depositing within 24 hours. About 3 million of the payments took more than 30 days.
The split by payment type is lopsided. Of the 39 million late payments, 19 million were electronic and totaled $126 billion, while 20 million were paper and totaled $454 billion. Added together, the two groups match the 39 million count and the $580 billion total. Paper accounted for roughly half of the late payments (20 of 39 million) but about 78 percent of the dollars ($454 billion of $580 billion), which is the arithmetic behind the report’s attention to checks.
Paper checks, lockboxes and a mostly electronic system
Most payments no longer arrive on paper. The report puts electronic payments at 245 million of 288 million in 2024, about 85 percent, up 31 percent from 187 million in 2018. Even so, TIGTA reports that the IRS will keep using two lockbox locations to accept checks and money orders until December 2027, and that IRS management said it will not refuse paper checks in calendar year 2026.
The IRS’s own payments page describes the options in plain terms. A check or money order is accepted for all tax payments. Direct Pay is described as “free, fast and secure with the IRS,” and debit or credit card payments are accepted for most tax payments with fees applying. A separate IRS page on modernizing payments draws a line that is easy to blur: the phase-out of paper refund checks began Sept. 30, 2025, but for payments made to the IRS, “existing forms and procedures should be used” until further notice.
Two recommendations, both accepted by the IRS
TIGTA made two recommendations to the agency, and the IRS response to them is recorded in the report as “Agreed.” One of them, in the excerpt read for this article, asks the IRS to perform a study to identify root causes. The report does not say when that study would finish or whether the false notices are expected to stop.
For a household, the practical question is narrower than the study. A payment was made, a notice said otherwise, and the agency’s own statement, as TIGTA quotes it, was to ignore the balance due notice and any interest and penalties when payment had already been sent. The proof that a payment was sent lives in the taxpayer’s own records, such as a bank statement, a Direct Pay confirmation or a cancelled check.
The number itself comes straight from the watchdog. Report 2026-108-054 puts the count at 28,929 taxpayers sent notices in error, describes the IRS’s June 2025 website statement as the response, and lists the agency as agreeing to both of its recommendations.
When a balance-due notice arrives after a payment
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit is written for households dealing with IRS letters about refunds and balances, especially when a notice and a bank record seem to disagree. It is a reference for reading such letters and keeping a running record of them.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit is a 13-page kit with a notice decoder and a refund status tracker spreadsheet for logging each letter and each date.
Click here to get The IRS Refund Recovery Kit and its notice decoder →
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the cited public sources.
