With hurricane season still active and wildfire risk elevated across parts of the West, the IRS used the first week of National Preparedness Month to make an unusual pitch: treat your tax paperwork like an emergency supply. The agency’s September 3 reminder, IR-2026-104, walks through what to protect and how, on the theory that a household scrambling to rebuild after a flood or fire has enough to deal with without also fighting to reconstruct its financial history from memory. The advice is aimed at every taxpayer, the release notes, including people who don’t live anywhere near a typical disaster zone.
What the IRS Wants Protected First
The release opens with the basics: tax returns, birth certificates, Social Security cards, insurance policies, and property titles belong in a waterproof and fireproof container, not a filing cabinet in a basement that floods. Beyond physical storage, the IRS recommends scanning paper records and saving electronic copies to a secure device or the cloud, noting that many banks and other financial institutions already offer statements electronically, which removes one category of paperwork from the list entirely.
IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano framed the guidance as universal rather than regional: “All taxpayers, even those in areas not prone to disaster, should take precautionary steps outlined in IRS resources to plan for the loss of valuable property and to ensure important financial records are protected.” Disasters, the release points out, tend to arrive with little warning, which is precisely why the paperwork has to be handled before one hits rather than after.
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Why Photos of Your Property Matter for Taxes and Insurance
Beyond documents, the IRS specifically calls out photographing or filming the inside and outside of a home, business, and vehicles before anything happens to them. The release says that kind of visual record “can help support claims of losses of property for tax purposes, as well as insurance claims after a disaster.” It points taxpayers to the IRS’s own disaster loss workbook, which walks through building a room-by-room list of belongings and equipment, so that a claim later isn’t built from memory alone.
That’s a narrower statement than it might sound. The release ties documentation to supporting a claim, not to guaranteeing one; whether a specific loss actually qualifies for a tax benefit is a separate question governed by its own rules, which the IRS addresses elsewhere in the same release.
Disaster Tax Relief Can Move Deadlines Automatically
When the IRS formally designates a disaster area, certain filing and payment deadlines that fall inside the postponement period get pushed back to a later relief date. For most affected taxpayers, that relief kicks in automatically once the IRS identifies their address of record as being inside the covered area, with no application required. Taxpayers who live outside the disaster zone but whose records are located inside it, such as someone whose accountant’s office sits in the affected county, have to call the IRS Special Services Hotline to request the same relief rather than receiving it automatically. The IRS also recommends every household review and update its own emergency plan annually, pointing to the checklists on Ready.gov as a starting point.
When an Uninsured Loss Can Become a Casualty-Loss Claim
Separately from the documentation advice, the release states that individuals and businesses that sustain uninsured or unreimbursed disaster-related losses “may be eligible to claim those losses on a federal tax return, subject to applicable tax law requirements.” For the specifics of what qualifies, the IRS directs taxpayers to Publication 547, Casualties, Disasters, and Thefts, which lays out the rules governing casualty-loss deductions rather than treating documentation alone as sufficient. In other words, good photos and saved records make a legitimate claim easier to support; they don’t, on their own, create eligibility where the underlying loss doesn’t otherwise qualify.
What Business Owners Should Also Check
The release adds a short list for employers specifically: businesses that use a payroll service provider should confirm the provider carries a fiduciary bond, which protects the business if the provider fails to make required tax deposits. Eligible business taxpayers can also use the IRS’s Business Tax Account to check balances and payment history, and businesses already enrolled in the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System can keep using it for federal deposits without interruption, disaster or not. For anyone, business or individual, who needs a copy of a past return after records are gone, the release points to Get Your Tax Records and Transcripts on IRS.gov as the fastest way to reconstruct a filing history.
None of this changes what a disaster does to a home or a business. What IR-2026-104 is really arguing is that the paperwork trail left behind afterward, whether it exists or not, is one of the few pieces of the recovery that a household still has full control over today.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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