The IRS Now Has the Authority to Revoke Passports
Jennifer Billock March 15, 2016
Have a hefty tax debt? Better get it taken care of now, or the IRS might take away your passport.
Attention travelers: The IRS can now legally revoke your passport if you owe them money. A new section was recently added to H.R.22 (the FAST Act) that allows the IRS to take away a U.S. citizen’s passport in certain cases. It’s called “Revocation or Denial of Passport in Case of Certain Tax Delinquencies,” and the wheels have been in motion since 2012 when the idea of using passports as tax vehicles first surfaced. Now it’s law, and it could have serious consequences.
The basic guidelines for the law say that any U.S. citizen with $50,000 of unpaid federal taxes (including penalties and interest) will be unable to get a new passport or renew an old one. If the IRS has filed a notice of lien against you, that is also considered reason enough to revoke a passport. Liens filings are not unusual — and they have been filed by mistake in past instances. The law also allows for the State Department to take away current passports from citizens deemed to have too much tax debt.
People making regular payments or contesting a large debt should be immune to the law, but that is yet to be seen as details are still mostly unavailable, Forbes reported. Special circumstances may allow the law to be overruled, like if one is needed for an emergency or humanitarian effort.
[Photo: Getty Images]
I find this worrying, not because of people that owe large amounts of taxes but because the IRS is responsible for enforcing ACA fines.
This law has not yet been implemented, despite the legislation being signed into law by Obama in 2015. In other words, those free US citizens with IRS tax debts of $50,000 or more are still being issued standard US passports as they were even in 2014 and 2015. A delay -- even months, years or even decades -- between something becoming law and being instituted into administrative practice by the federal government's Exec Branch is not unusual. That is the case with this law too.