The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reports that IRS management said the agency will not refuse a paper check as payment in calendar year 2026, and that the IRS will keep using two lockbox locations for checks and money orders until December 2027. The findings appear in report 2026-108-054, dated September 16, 2026. For taxpayers who pay a balance by mail, the report and the agency’s own pages point the same way.
What TIGTA report 2026-108-054 says about checks and lockboxes
The TIGTA audit, titled “The IRS Is Making Payments Easier, but Processing Can Be Improved,” addresses how taxpayer payments reach the Treasury. It quotes IRS management on two points that matter to anyone who mails a check. “In CY 2026, the IRS will not refuse to accept a paper check as payment,” the report says. It adds that “the IRS will continue using two lockbox locations to accept checks and money orders until December 2027.”
The wording sets two clocks. The check commitment runs through calendar year 2026, and the lockbox commitment runs a full year longer. The report does not announce an end date for paper checks after 2026, and it does not say what happens when the lockboxes close. Deputy Inspector General for Audit Diana M. Tengesdal is listed on the report, which was issued under TIGTA’s audit division.
The IRS payments page still lists checks for all tax payments
The IRS’s own payments page, dated September 18, lists the options side by side. Under check or money order it says “All tax payments accepted.” Direct Pay, the IRS’s bank-transfer tool, is described as “Free, fast and secure with the IRS.” Debit or credit card payments are accepted for most tax payments, and the page says fees apply.
The comparison matters for a household budget. A mailed check costs a stamp and the time in transit, while a card payment carries a fee that the page says applies. The page does not put a number on the card fee, so the amount depends on the processor a taxpayer chooses.
Paper refund checks are ending, but payments to the IRS run on a separate track
Two different paper-check stories are easy to confuse. The IRS newsroom page on modernizing payments to and from America’s bank account describes a phase-out of paper tax refund checks beginning September 30, 2025, “to the extent permitted by law.” That change concerns money the IRS sends out.
Payments going the other way are handled differently. The same page says, “Until further notice, existing forms and procedures should be used to make payments to the IRS.” The page also gives the government’s reason for the electronic push: paper checks are “over 16 times more likely to be lost, stolen, altered, or delayed than electronic payments.” TIGTA describes the underlying order, Executive Order 14247, as requiring a governmentwide transition to electronic payments, issued in March 2025.
The result is a split. Refund checks are being phased out, while a taxpayer who owes money can still send a check, and the inspector general’s report says the IRS will keep taking them through 2026.
How many payments took more than three days to deposit
The audit also measured how quickly payments were processed. For calendar years 2018 through 2024, TIGTA found more than 39 million payments, totaling over $580 billion, that took more than three days to deposit after receipt. Of those late deposits, about 20 million were paper payments and about 19 million were electronic.
Those counts describe volume, not the odds for any one payment. The report’s numbers do not say what share of all paper payments or all electronic payments were late, so they do not show that a check is more likely to be delayed than an electronic payment. They do show that delay happened in large numbers on both paths.
The two recommendations the IRS accepted
TIGTA made two recommendations. The first is to perform a study to identify the root causes for delays in processing taxpayer payments. The second is to ensure that planned processing improvements, such as real-time entity validation, for payment errors are completed. The IRS agreed to both, according to the response recorded in the report.
The report is an audit of processing, not a rule change. It records what IRS management told the inspector general about paper checks and lockboxes, and the payments page and the newsroom page are the agency’s own statements of current practice.
What “through 2026” leaves open
The commitment in the report covers calendar year 2026 and no further. The IRS pages read for this article say checks are accepted for all tax payments and that existing procedures continue until further notice, but none of them names a date after which mailed checks stop being accepted. Anyone who pays by check in 2027 will need to check the IRS payments page for the practice in effect then, since the lockbox commitment reaches December 2027 while the check commitment is stated only for 2026.
Paper checks going out and coming in
The IRS is phasing out paper refund checks while still accepting paper checks for payments, and the two changes are easy to mix up. The gap is what happens to a refund that was expected by mail and does not arrive, or one that is held after an IRS notice.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes a notice decoder, the refund-trace steps for Form 3911 and a refund status tracker spreadsheet.
Open the Form 3911 refund-trace steps in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit →
This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked against the cited TIGTA report and IRS pages.
