Main Street Dollars

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Filing correctly is only half of what many households need from the IRS; the other half is a live person on the phone when something goes wrong. During the 2026 filing season, the agency fielded 48.1 million of those calls and put a telephone assistor on the line for just 9.9 million of them. For…

More than 14 million returns were suspended in processing this filing season

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Roughly one in every ten individual returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service in 2026 never moved straight from submission to refund. An automated filter caught the return, froze it for additional review, and left the filer waiting on money that rent, groceries or a medical bill might already depend on. The National Taxpayer Advocate’s…

Interest on unpaid federal tax stays at 7% a year for the quarter starting October 1

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A tax balance left unpaid past its due date keeps growing every single day, not just every quarter, and the growth rate for the final three months of 2026 will not change from where it sat over the summer. The Internal Revenue Service has confirmed that the rate charged on individual underpayments — and paid…

An extension moved the October filing date, not the April payment date

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A common mix-up trips up filers every extension season: requesting more time to file a 2025 tax return did not buy more time to pay what was owed on it. Form 4868 pushed the paperwork deadline out to October 15, 2026, but the amount owed still came due back on April 15, and the IRS…

The IRS charges 5% of unpaid tax for every month a return is late, capped at 25%

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A tax return filed one day past its due date and a return filed five months late face completely different arithmetic, and the gap between them is where the Internal Revenue Service keeps its steepest civil penalty on the books. The failure-to-file penalty adds 5% of the unpaid tax for every month or partial month…

The FTC lists a second Next-Gen refund round of more than $13.5 million for people who cashed their first check.

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The Federal Trade Commission says it is sending a second round of Next-Gen refund checks totaling more than $13.5 million. The payment round is for people who cashed their first checks after losing money to a prize scheme operated by Next-Gen and related companies, according to the FTC’s current refund-program page. The listed total is…

Taxpayers checked refund status about 346 million times in the 2026 filing season, IRS’s taxpayer advocate reports.

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Taxpayers checked refund status about 346 million times during the 2026 filing season, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s report to Congress. The report says use of the IRS’s Where’s My Refund? tool rose 9 percent from the prior year. The number counts status checks, not 346 million refunds or 346 million individual taxpayers. For…

The IRS says its online accounts were used nearly 121 million times during filing season.

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The IRS says taxpayers used Individual Online Accounts nearly 121 million times during the 2026 filing season. The number comes from the National Taxpayer Advocate’s mid-year report, which describes how often people logged into the service. It is a usage figure, not a count of unique taxpayers, a refund total or a promise that every…

The IRS says a new estimated-tax tip applies beyond the self-employed, including people with income not fully covered by withholding.

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Estimated tax is often associated with self-employment, but the IRS says it can apply more broadly when income is not fully covered by withholding. The agency’s September 14 tax tip points to interest, dividends, capital gains, rents, royalties and prizes as examples of income that may require an estimated-tax payment. The rule is not a…

IRS says old bank statements, photos, videos and county records can help rebuild disaster-loss records.

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