This is the full transcript of IRS Monday for October 5, 2026. Prefer to watch? The video is below.
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Transcript
Good morning. It’s Monday, and this is IRS Monday. I’m Darrin Mish, tax attorney. Every Monday, I take the IRS news, cut out the noise, and tell you what actually matters if you owe the IRS or you think you might. Three things today: a deadline that’s 10 days away and the one mistake that turns a tax bill into a much bigger tax bill, a new IRS app that puts your account on your phone, and a new rule that lets some farmland sellers pay their tax over four years.
Let’s go. The headline: October 15th. If you filed an extension back in April, your 2025 return is due Thursday, October the 15th. That’s the final extended deadline for most individual returns. There’s no second extension. If you live in a federally declared disaster area, your deadline may have been pushed back, so check.
For everybody else, it’s the 15th. Here’s what most people believe about the extension. They think it gave them more time to pay. It didn’t. An extension gives you more time to file. The tax was due in April. Interest has been running on any unpaid balance since April 15th, and right now that rate is seven percent a year compounded daily.
The IRS already announced it’s staying at seven percent through the end of this year. Here’s the part most people miss. When people can’t pay, they don’t file. They figure, why send in a return when I can’t send in the check? And that’s the most expensive mistake in this whole business. The IRS has two different penalties.
There’s a penalty for not paying, and it’s a half a percent a month, and there’s a penalty for not filing, and it’s five percent a month. Five percent, ten times bigger. Both of them max out at twenty-five percent, but the filing penalty gets there in five months. The paying penalty takes over four years.
And if your return is more than sixty days late, there’s a minimum penalty. For returns due this year, it’s five hundred and twenty-five dollars or the full tax you owe, whichever is less. So even a small balance gets hit. There’s one more reason to file on time. If you file on time and then set up a payment plan, the failure to pay penalty drops in half, to a quarter of a percent a month.
You only get that break if the return was filed on time. Now think about what that means. Filing on time, even with no money attached, stops the big penalty and shrinks the small one. Not filing does the opposite. I’ve been doing this for thirty-two years, and I can tell you the IRS treats somebody who files and can’t pay very differently from somebody who disappears.
The one who files has options, payment plans, hardship status, sometimes a settlement. The one who disappears eventually gets a return the IRS prepares for them, usually without the deductions and credits they’d have claimed and a bill that’s bigger than it should be. So if you’re sitting on an extended return because you can’t pay, file it anyway.
Pay what you can pay with it, then deal with the balance. The balance is a solvable problem. Hiding from it is the part that gets really expensive. Now the quick hits. Number one, the IRS has a new app. On September twenty-fifth, the IRS launched a new official app called simply the IRS app. It replaces IRS2Go.
If you had IRS2Go with automatic updates turned on, it’ll update to the new one on its own. And here’s why it matters. A lot of what’s in your IRS online account is now on your phone. Your balance, your payments, your notices and letters, your transcripts, and your identity protection PIN. Last week, I told you to log in, look at your balance, and get an identity protection PIN.
Now you can do all of that from your phone while you’re waiting in line for coffee. One warning, scammers love a new app. Only download it from the Apple App Store or Google Play, never from a link in a text message or an email. The IRS doesn’t text you out of the blue asking you to click something. Number two, farmland.
On September 28th, Treasury and the IRS put out proposed rules for a provision in the tax law passed in July of last year. Here’s how it works. If you sell farmland to someone who’s actively farming and the land is legally restricted to farm use for 10 years after the sale, you can elect to pay the tax on your gain in four equal installments instead of all at once, 25% a year for four years.
The land has to have been farmed or leased to a farmer for substantially all of the 10 years before the sale. I run cattle on my own place, so this one’s close to home. A lot of farm families are land rich and cash poor. When the older generation sells, the tax bill can land all at once and force a bad decision.
This gives them room to breathe. It’s not free money, it’s time, but time is worth a lot when the alternative is selling equipment to pay the IRS. If you’re thinking about selling farmland, get advice before you sign anything because that 10-year restriction has to be in place for it to work. The comment period on the proposed rule runs through November 30th.
Here’s this week’s takeaway. An extension is time to file, not time to pay. October 15th is the deadline. If you owe and you can’t pay, file anyway. The penalty for not filing is ten times the penalty for not paying, and filing on time is what gets you the cheaper payment plan rate. So this week do two things.
If you’re on an extension, get your return filed by the 15th and download the new IRS app from the App Store, log in, and look at what the IRS says you owe. If what you find scares you, that’s what we’re here for. The reality is usually much more manageable than the nightmare in your head. If you owe the IRS and you wanna know where you actually stand, let’s talk.
Go to getirshelp.com or call my office at 813-229-7100. If you want IRS Monday in your inbox every week, the sign-up link is below. I’ll see you next Monday, and thanks for watching.
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