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…

A taxpayer whose identity was stolen and used to file a fraudulent tax return waited 20 months, on average, for the Internal Revenue Service to resolve the case and release a refund, a new federal audit found. The finding comes from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the independent office that audits IRS operations,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A federal scam warning issued on September 18, 2026 names a scheme built around a tax credit that does not exist. Promoters have been marketing a so-called “Tribal Tax Credit,” a “Native American Tax Credit,” or a “Sovereign Tribal Tax Credit” to taxpayers, tribal communities, and even tax professionals, claiming it can erase a tax…

When a taxpayer’s refund can’t reach a bank account because the routing or account number is wrong, missing, or rejected outright, the IRS no longer simply defaults to mailing a check. It sends a notice called CP53E, starts a 30-day clock, and asks the taxpayer to fix the direct deposit online before that window closes.…

A tax refund that stalls in IRS processing used to have one dependable backstop: if the bank account on file didn’t work, a paper check eventually showed up anyway, no extra steps required. That backstop is gone for the 2026 filing season. Any Form 1040 return that reaches the IRS without valid direct deposit information…