Category: Taxes Made Simple
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With gas averaging $4.74, Indiana, Utah, Illinois and Kentucky have cut or frozen gas taxes as Ohio weighs a 90-day break
Four states have already moved to cut, freeze or suspend their gas taxes this year, and a fifth is now deciding whether to join them. Indiana, Utah, Illinois and Kentucky have each taken a different route to lower the tax portion of the pump price, while Ohio lawmakers are weighing a 90-day suspension of their…
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Tax shelter promoter Aanand Shukla received a five-year prison sentence
Aanand Shukla, a Jonestown, Texas, man who sold an abusive trust tax shelter to business owners across the country, has been sentenced to 60 months, or five years, in federal prison. The Justice Department announced the sentence on September 11, 2026, and said Shukla helped clients hide more than $27 million in income from the…
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The IRS will retire FIRE information-return filing on November 19
The Internal Revenue Service will stop accepting information returns through its Filing Information Returns Electronically system, known as FIRE, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on November 19, 2026. In news release IR-2026-99, the agency told current FIRE users to move to its Information Returns Intake System, or IRIS, before the 2027 filing season. The change…
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A demonstrator car qualifies for the new loan interest deduction, but a lease buyout does not
The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have finished the rulebook for the new car loan interest deduction, and the fine print separates two buyers who look nearly identical standing on the same dealer lot. One finances a demonstrator car, the vehicle a dealership keeps on hand for test drives, and qualifies. The other…
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The IRS had no matching form for 15 million returns reporting retirement income
A pension payment, an annuity or a withdrawal from an individual retirement account produces the same piece of paper twice. One copy of Form 1099-R goes to the retiree, usually in January. The other goes to the Internal Revenue Service, and it is not due there until the end of March. A federal watchdog has…
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Paper individual returns took the IRS 30 days against its own 13-day standard
The Internal Revenue Service keeps a written clock on tax returns that arrive in envelopes, and during the filing season that ended in April it ran more than twice as long as its own rulebook allows. Congressional auditors who examined the 2026 season found the agency averaged 30 days to process a paper individual income…
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More than a million people waited about five and a half weeks past normal for a refund this year
Each June, the National Taxpayer Advocate delivers Congress an assessment of the tax filing season that just ended, and this year’s verdict was largely positive: the Internal Revenue Service processed nearly 139 million individual returns and issued more than 90 million refunds despite new tax law changes and a shrinking workforce. But folded into that…
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The IRS flagged 7.5 million returns for identity theft, and about half of them were legitimate
The Internal Revenue Service runs dozens of computer filters designed to catch fraudulent tax returns before a refund goes out the door, and those filters also catch a lot of honest taxpayers along the way. A new watchdog report puts numbers to that tradeoff: of the roughly 7.5 million individual tax returns the IRS’s identity…
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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…