Category: Taxes Made Simple
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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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A watchdog says the IRS held every refund it could on returns with no bank details, mailing 4.2 million notices
The Internal Revenue Service sat on refund money longer than it had to during the 2026 filing season, and a federal watchdog says that delay was deliberate. A new report describes an agency that used every day the rules allowed rather than releasing refunds to taxpayers who had not supplied a bank account for direct…
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Private debt collectors working for the IRS brought in $6.1 billion in three years
The Internal Revenue Service does not send every overdue account to one of its own revenue officers or in-house call centers. Since 2015, a slice of the agency’s oldest unpaid tax debts has gone instead to independent collection firms working under federal contract, a program now large enough that the agency’s own watchdog tracks how…
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571,000 federal employees and retirees owe the IRS $6.3 billion
More than 571,000 current and retired federal employees carry an unresolved federal tax obligation totaling roughly $6.3 billion, a balance that has grown by $1.5 billion, or 32 percent, since fiscal year 2021. The count comes from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s review of the Internal Revenue Service’s long-running program for tracking tax…
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A 2026 W-2 will carry three box 12 codes that have never existed before
Every January, employers fill in a short alphabet of letter codes down the side of Form W-2’s box 12, each one steering a different kind of pay or benefit toward the right line on a tax return. For the form covering the 2026 tax year, that alphabet gains three entries that have never existed before.…
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The IRS is closing its EFTPS payment system to individual taxpayers later this year
A federal fact sheet updated by the Internal Revenue Service in January 2026 confirms that a payment system millions of individual taxpayers have relied on for years is being phased out before the end of the year. The change traces back to a 2025 presidential directive ordering federal agencies to move away from paper-based and…
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The IRS closed 430,900 substitute returns last year without ever reaching the taxpayer
Late last month, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration published its annual look at how the Internal Revenue Service handles people who never filed a tax return, and one figure stood apart from the rest. Of the 592,800 substitute-return cases the agency closed in fiscal year 2025, 430,900 closed without the IRS ever making…