A search of the federal government’s own pages turns up no tariff dividend check. No agency has put up a payment page, an application, an eligibility rule or a payment schedule for a roughly $2,000 per-person tariff payment, and the pages read for this article do not mention one. That is a statement about what…

A federal refund can shrink for two reasons that look alike on a bank statement: the IRS changed the return, or Treasury applied part of the refund to a debt. For the second kind, the IRS names four categories: past-due child support, federal agency non-tax debts, state income tax obligations and certain state unemployment compensation…

The White House has announced a $500 refund for people who buy full-price health coverage through HealthCare.gov, and the amount is set per person, not per household. That detail matters for families: a household with several full-price enrollees could be in line for more than one $500 payment. The plan is an announcement so far,…

A tax refund that once could be turned into savings bonds appears to have lost that route. Draft instructions for Form 8888, the IRS form for splitting a refund among accounts, say the program allowing a refund to be deposited into a TreasuryDirect account to buy savings bonds has been discontinued. Because the document is…

Households that paid a tax bill when they filed in mid-April 2025 were not supposed to hear from the IRS again about that balance. For 28,929 taxpayers, a notice arrived anyway, saying the payment had not been received. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the agency’s independent watchdog, documented the mistake in a report…

Not every taxpayer went along with the IRS’s move away from paper refund checks. More than 300,000 of them, 300,537 to be exact, got permission to keep receiving a check in the mail instead of a direct deposit, according to a new watchdog report. The number, current as of March 30, 2026, shows how large…

The IRS’s toll-free line for paper-check questions rang nearly 352,000 times in the months after a new round of notices went out, according to a watchdog report. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration tracked the calls through March 28, 2026, as the agency moved to end most paper tax refund checks under a federal…

IRS2Go, the Internal Revenue Service’s mobile app for more than a decade, no longer exists as a standalone product. The agency retired it this week and replaced it with a new app that gives taxpayers a mobile window into their refund and amended-return status, their account balance, recent payments, digital notices, tax transcripts and their…

Auditors at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration pulled 114 identity-theft case files from the IRS and found that only 4 of them closed within the agency’s own 120-day target, with the sample as a whole averaging 655 days from start to finish. The finding, published September 21, offers one of the clearest looks…

The Internal Revenue Service paid about $124.2 million in interest to identity-theft victims whose refunds sat frozen while their cases worked through the agency’s system, according to a federal audit covering three fiscal years. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration published the figure on September 21, drawing it directly from cases the IRS itself…