Aanand Shukla, a Jonestown, Texas, man who sold an abusive trust tax shelter to business owners across the country, has been sentenced to 60 months, or five years, in federal prison. The Justice Department announced the sentence on September 11, 2026, and said Shukla helped clients hide more than $27 million in income from the…

The Internal Revenue Service will stop accepting information returns through its Filing Information Returns Electronically system, known as FIRE, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on November 19, 2026. In news release IR-2026-99, the agency told current FIRE users to move to its Information Returns Intake System, or IRIS, before the 2027 filing season. The change…

A pension payment, an annuity or a withdrawal from an individual retirement account produces the same piece of paper twice. One copy of Form 1099-R goes to the retiree, usually in January. The other goes to the Internal Revenue Service, and it is not due there until the end of March. A federal watchdog has…

Tax-prep newsletters and personal-finance sites have been publishing specific numbers for next year for weeks now — a bracket threshold here, a retirement-contribution ceiling there. Households trying to plan a raise or a bigger 401(k) contribution around one of those figures are working from math the Internal Revenue Service has not published. The agency’s own…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…