A new federal audit of the 2026 tax filing season found an unusual split in refund sizes. Taxpayers who never gave the Internal Revenue Service a bank account for direct deposit, and instead waited on a mailed paper check, received refunds that averaged $5,624. The much larger group of filers who used direct deposit averaged…

More than 1.9 million taxpayers have opened a letter this filing season telling them their refund is ready but the IRS could not send it. The letter, Notice CP53E, sets an exact number of days to fix the problem before the refund defaults to the payment method the agency is trying to eliminate entirely: a…

A federal watchdog report released this summer shows the Internal Revenue Service has already sent more than 1.9 million notices telling taxpayers their refund could not be direct-deposited as filed. The notices, known as CP53E, are the direct result of a 2025 executive order that phased out paper federal refund checks starting last fall. For…

A technical fix buried in last year’s tax legislation is now deciding whether thousands of Indiana households can actually collect refunds the Internal Revenue Service already owes them. For years, disaster survivors who followed the agency’s own instructions sometimes learned only later that a refund they were entitled to had technically expired before they ever…

A federal tax refund can arrive smaller than the number on the return for two very different reasons, and only one of them has anything to do with the IRS. The first is a correction to the return itself — a math error, a disallowed credit, an old tax bill. The second is a debt…

By the time the IRS closed the books on its final weekly tally of the 2026 filing season, the count that ran through May 8, the average individual refund stood at $3,276, up $337 from the $2,939 average at the same point in the 2025 season. That comparison comes from the agency’s own season-ending data…

The IRS’s shutdown of paper refund checks turned one ordinary filing mistake, a bad bank routing number, into a notice with its own name and its own clock: CP53E, with exactly 30 days attached to fix it. Anyone who’s filed a return expecting a refund and instead found a notice in the mailbox is dealing…

If you live or run a business in one of six Washington counties, the IRS just gave you until February 1, 2027 to file returns and pay taxes that would otherwise have been due this fall. That part follows a well-worn disaster-relief script. The overlooked part is a separate, newer rule that changes how much…

Every filing season, the same question drives more traffic to IRS.gov than almost any other: where is my refund? The IRS answered it again this week in a routine reminder about its online tools, and buried in that reminder is a specific, checkable timeline for when a refund actually shows up as trackable in the…

Nothing has happened to H.R. 9768 since the afternoon it was filed. The official record shows three actions, all stamped July 16, 2026: introduced in the House, introduced in the House again as the clerk logs it, and referred to the Committee on Ways and Means. No hearing, no markup, no vote, and no cosponsors…