“There are a number of things taxpayers can do to get ready as the end of 2024 nears and the start of the 2025 tax season approaches,” said a Dec. 19 statement from the agency. The latest reminder is part of the “Get Ready” series in which the IRS publishes key updates as the start of the 2025 tax season approaches.

The IRS encouraged taxpayers to sign up for an IRS Online Account. The account helps individuals view key information from their recent returns, make and cancel payments, get electronic notices from the agency, set up payment plans, and sign forms like powers of attorney, among other things.

Besides the account, the IRS recommended getting an Identity Protection Personal Identification Number, or IP PIN. “An IP PIN is a six-digit number that prevents someone else from filing a federal tax return using an individual’s Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.”

“It’s a vital tool for ensuring the safety of taxpayers’ personal and financial information,” the agency said.

For the 2025 filing season, the IRS has made an update regarding dependents on tax forms.

Taxpayers claim dependents during filing returns to receive certain deductions and credits like the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, medical expense deduction, and education credits.

Sometimes, multiple people claim the same individuals as dependents on tax forms, like for instance, former spouses.

The IRS processes tax returns in the order they receive. As such, if the agency had already processed a return with certain dependents, another return seeking to claim the same individuals gets rejected.

However, starting from the 2025 filing season, returns claiming same dependents shall be accepted by the agency, provided the taxpayer includes a valid IP PIN.

The IRS says the new update “will reduce the time for the agency to receive the tax return and accelerate the issuance of tax refunds for those with duplicate dependent returns.”

“The best way to sign up for an IP PIN is through the IRS Online Account,” the agency said. However, “if an individual is unable to create an Online Account, alternative methods are available, such as in-person authentication at a Taxpayer Assistance Center.”

The IRS also highlighted the upcoming estimated tax payment due date.

“Taxpayers with non-wage income—such as unemployment benefits, self-employment income, annuity payments or earnings from digital assets—may need to make estimated or additional tax payments,” said the agency.

The deadline to make these payments for the September–December quarter of 2024 is Jan. 15.

1099-K Reporting, Digital Assets

Taxpayers who sold goods or services and collected over $5,000 in receipts via payment apps or online marketplaces in 2024 “should expect to receive a Form 1099-K,” the IRS said.

The form details payments received by taxpayers engaged in such transactions. Taxpayers must now account for these incomes when filing returns.

When previously the form was issued if the total transaction value in a year exceeded $20,000, currently the threshold is set at $5,000. This reduction is part of a plan to eventually reduce the limit to $600.

The IRS clarified that “taxpayers must report all income on their tax return unless it’s excluded by law, whether they receive a Form 1099-K or not.”

“The law doesn’t allow taxpayers to avoid taxes on income earned just because they didn’t get a form reporting the payments received.”

Form 1099-K income threshold reduction has come under criticism from lawmakers.

Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.) introduced the “Saving Gig Economy Taxpayers Act” which seeks to revert it back to $20,000. She called the reduction “a tax hike on Americans and gig workers who use online payment platforms.”

Meanwhile, the IRS also reminded taxpayers to report all income related to digital assets like cryptocurrencies when filing the 2024 returns.

“If a taxpayer had digital asset transactions last year, they should be sure to keep records that prove their purchase, receipt, sale, exchange or any other disposition of the digital assets,” the IRS said. This includes the fair market value of such assets measured in U.S. dollars.

The IRS received around $5.1 trillion in tax revenues in the latest fiscal year 2024, roughly $400 billion more than in the previous year.

By the way, according to the IRS press office, the additional audits have so far raised less than $2 billion, far less than the additional expenditures. So how is this program “paying for itself”?

This was never about seeking tax fairness, as liberals claimed. It was about unleashing an aggressive, permanent and unchecked enforcement assault on U.S. taxpayers to rake in more tax dollars to pay for liberals’ political agenda. The American people voted to end such madness, and the IRS should now act accordingly and immediately by ignoring the Biden administration’s 11th-hour efforts to ram through a slew of costly new rules and regulations as they now head toward the exit.

Progressive leaders made wildly erroneous claims that a supersized IRS would raise nearly $1 trillion over 10 years from stepped-up enforcement against higher-income earners and businesses. And they attempted to justify their proposals by broadly portraying entrepreneurs, small businesses, family-owned private enterprises and the wealthy as tax cheats. The entire exercise was designed to harass lawful taxpayers and threaten them as guilty parties until they could prove themselves innocent.

Fortunately, most voters saw their efforts for what they were: a liberal fantasy grab of other peoples’ money and an attempt to assert greater control over their livelihoods. Democrat leaders did not help themselves by immediately over-steering the car. This included efforts to have the IRS spy on personal bank accounts and require income reporting for basic Venmo payments among friends, as well as punitive measures on those whose incomes are derived from tips or numerous other types of transactions.

Another target for IRS harassment has been business partnerships. Such businesses are one of the most common and practical ways to structure private enterprises of all sizes. A simple analogy might be when one party owns an available tractor and another has available land, and they go into business together to farm the land. All told, there are an estimated 4.5 million business partnerships in America. Collectively, these partnerships generate more than $12 trillion in revenue and employ millions of U.S. workers.

Yet the IRS, before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office, is now stealthily attempting to implement new rules that threaten the future viability of such partnerships. These proposed changes to the tax code impact what is known as “basis shifting” – a routine and legal practice that business partners use to adjust the tax basis of their respective assets. In short, the proposed rules would deliberately embed uncertainty and subjective IRS interpretations of how taxable assets are treated when one transfers or sells their interest in a business partnership. Basically, the opposite of tax fairness.

Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar bounty the Biden administration claimed their newly armed IRS would secure through added enforcement and new tax rules has completely failed to materialize. The IRS recently disclosed that just $1 billion had been recovered since their aggressive campaign went into effect two years ago, and there is no way of knowing if that would have occurred with or without it. How ironic and sad is it for taxpayers to learn that the vast amount of the $80 billion Democrats awarded to the IRS to recover or find new “savings” is instead on pace to serve as a massive cost to the U.S. Treasury?

The last thing voters now want is for the IRS to impose any more costly last-minute tax changes that will make problems even worse for taxpayers, workers and employers. Accordingly, the Biden team and the IRS should put down their pencils. And if they persist with these fourth-quarter rule changes, the Trump team should be prepared to immediately repeal them in January.

As Tom Ozimek reports, via The Epoch Times, the fiscal year 2024 report, released on Dec. 5, outlines a year of intensified enforcement for the IRS-CI, which serves as the tax agency’s law enforcement branch that focuses on tax violations that cross into criminal territory.

The report shows that the division achieved several firsts over the past year, including the first sentencing for syndicated conservation easement schemes, the first cryptocurrency tax fraud indictment, and a record-setting financial settlement with Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, for anti-money laundering violations.

IRS-CI special agents, who are authorized to carry guns and use lethal force, now number 2,290 after a hiring spree added 146 employees to its ranks over the fiscal year. The division’s overall workforce expansion is the largest in nearly a decade, bringing total headcount to 3,474 employees. Between 2010 and 2020, the division’s staffing numbers fell from 4,017 to 2,858.

IRS-CI Chief Guy Ficco said in the report that the demands on the division’s workforce have increased as “criminals utilize new venues, revise their techniques, and use emerging technologies to facilitate financial crimes.”

A turnaround in hiring in recent years across both the criminal investigations unit and the IRS more broadly has been fueled by the $80 billion funding boost under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, around $20 billion of which was later clawed back. Roughly $46 billion of the funding boost was designated for enforcement, a contentious part of the package that drew opposition from some Republican lawmakers, who argued it could lead to increased tax audits on lower- and middle-income Americans.

According to the fiscal year 2024 report, the IRS-CI launched 2,667 criminal investigations, leading to 1,571 convictions. The division raised its conviction rate from 88.4 percent in the 2023 fiscal year to 90 percent in 2024, which ended Sept. 30.

The division also uncovered $9.1 billion in fraud from tax and financial crimes, obtained $1.7 billion in court-ordered restitution, and seized approximately $1.2 billion in criminal assets.

The IRS-CI also expanded its international footprint by launching a new attaché post in Nassau, Bahamas, and a cyber attaché post in Singapore.

Ficco said in the report that the division’s focus heading into 2025 is to leverage its expanded resources and expertise to pursue financial crimes and protect the integrity of the U.S. tax system.