Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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FinWise Bank data breach claims close October 29, with documented losses paid up to $5,000
Anyone whose personal records sat inside FinWise Bank’s systems during a 2024 security failure is now working against a firm calendar set in a Salt Lake City federal court. The bank, its holding company, and a lending partner agreed to resolve a class-action lawsuit rather than keep fighting it, and the resulting fund now runs…
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CVS agreed to pay up to $20.5 million over what shoppers searched on its site, with claims closing November 16
A Florida circuit court has signed off on notice for a privacy settlement that traces back to something as routine as typing a drugstore item into a search bar. CVS Pharmacy and the digital advertising firm Criteo Corp. are resolving a lawsuit alleging that terms typed into CVS’s website and app search bar were captured…
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Treasury will put $1,000 into an account for a child born 2025 through 2028 once a parent files the election
Congress created a federal seed deposit for a defined set of newborns, then put control of it entirely in a parent’s hands. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has been depositing $1,000 into new investment accounts for eligible children since early July, but only for families that have actually filed the paperwork behind it. Millions…
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The 2027 tax brackets do not exist yet, and every figure circulating is a projection
Tax-prep newsletters and personal-finance sites have been publishing specific numbers for next year for weeks now — a bracket threshold here, a retirement-contribution ceiling there. Households trying to plan a raise or a bigger 401(k) contribution around one of those figures are working from math the Internal Revenue Service has not published. The agency’s own…
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IRS Free File stays open until October 15 for 2025 adjusted gross income of $89,000 or less
Extension filers with a 2025 federal return still outstanding have a firm cutoff in mid-October, and the Internal Revenue Service says the no-cost preparation option many assume disappeared after the spring rush is still open. Anyone whose adjusted gross income last year fell at or below $89,000 can still use guided software to finish a…
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A 2025 W-2 will not break out tips or overtime, so the records have to come from the worker
Servers, bartenders, delivery drivers and hourly employees planning to claim one of two new deductions on a 2025 tax return are running into an unfamiliar problem: the dollar figure the deduction depends on will not be sitting in a labeled box on this year’s Form W-2. The qualified tips deduction and the qualified overtime deduction,…
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From January the IRS will cancel a first-time penalty during processing instead of making people ask
The Internal Revenue Service is retiring one of its oldest customer-service shortcuts and replacing it with something that needs no phone call at all. Penalty relief for a first-time late return or late payment will start showing up on its own, built into the same computer run that processes the return, rather than waiting for…
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Paper tax returns took the IRS about a month to process this year
A congressional watchdog spent this year timing the Internal Revenue Service’s paperwork, and the numbers landed worse than the year before. A return dropped in the mail this spring sat in IRS’s processing pipeline roughly twice as long as one filed a year earlier, even as the agency finished the vast majority of everything it…
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An executive order gives the Agriculture Department 90 days to decide whether beef can carry a country-of-origin label
A White House order signed this month tells the Department of Agriculture to spend the next three months deciding whether grocery shoppers should be able to see where their beef was born, raised and slaughtered. The directive does not put a new label on a single package of ground chuck or ribeye today. It instructs…
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New federal rent ceilings for housing vouchers take effect October 1, and the deadline to challenge one is the same day
The rent ceiling that decides how much a Housing Choice Voucher covers resets nationwide on October 1, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s newest Fair Market Rents take hold. A separate clock buried in the same notice gives housing authorities exactly until that date to ask HUD to reconsider a number they believe…