Indiana
Drought Relief for Livestock Sales — and Tippecanoe County Is on the List
If you sold breeding or dairy stock in the drought and your replacement window closes at the end of 2026, it just got longer.
The IRS issued Notice 2026-54 on September 15, extending the replacement period for livestock sold because of drought, and this one lands close to home: 36 Indiana counties made the list, including Tippecanoe, Benton, Carroll, Clinton, Fountain, Montgomery, Warren, and White. The rule behind it is Section 1033(e), which lets a farmer treat a forced sale as an involuntary conversion — you defer the gain if you replace the animals, and the usual two-year window stretches to four.
What the notice does is extend that four-year window further, until the end of the first tax year ending after the first drought-free year for the region. Because the 12 months ended August 31, 2026 were not drought-free in the listed counties, a producer whose four-year period was set to run out at the end of 2026 gets more time. Two limits worth stating up front: it only covers animals held for draft, dairy, or breeding purposes — not stock raised for slaughter, not poultry — and only sales beyond what your usual business practice would have been.
Source: IRS Newsroom (IR-2026-110)
Security
The Security Summit’s Closing Argument to Tax Pros
If your firm doesn’t have a written security plan, Publication 5708 is the template — and it’s a requirement, not a suggestion.
The IRS and its Security Summit partners wrapped the fifth and final week of the “Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself” series on September 16, and the closing message was about the written plan most small firms still don’t have. A Written Information Security Plan isn’t optional — it’s a federal requirement for anyone who prepares returns — and Publication 5708 is a fill-in-the-blanks template built specifically for tax practices.
Alongside it the Summit repeated the “Security Six”: antivirus, firewalls, backups, drive encryption, multifactor authentication, and a VPN. The part that gets overlooked is the response plan rather than the prevention: if client data is breached, you report it to your local IRS Stakeholder Liaison and to the state tax agencies involved, and Form 14039 is how an affected client formally reports the identity theft.
Source: IRS Newsroom (IR-2026-111)
Scams
A Tax Credit That Doesn’t Exist Is Being Sold Anyway
Anyone selling you a tax credit at a discount under an NDA is selling you a penalty.
On September 18 the IRS warned about promoters marketing “Tribal Tax Credits,” “Native American Tax Credits,” and “Sovereign Tribal Tax Credits” — none of which exist under federal law. The pitch is the familiar one: buy the credit at a discount, apply it against your liability, pocket the spread. What buyers actually get is a false claim on their return, which means the tax comes back plus interest, plus civil penalties, and potentially criminal exposure.
The red flags the IRS lists are worth memorizing because they recur across every version of this scheme: pressure to decide quickly, a credit offered well below face value, a legal opinion you can’t independently verify, and a request that you sign a nondisclosure agreement. Legitimate tax planning does not require secrecy. Suspected promoters can be reported on Form 14242.
Source: IRS Newsroom (IR-2026-112)
Enforcement
39,000 High-Income Nonfiler Cases Sat Still for Two Years
The nonfiler backlog was a delay, not a reprieve — those cases started moving again in March.
A Treasury Inspector General report released September 15 found that nearly 39,000 high-priority nonfiler cases — about 33,653 taxpayers, carrying an estimated $15.7 billion in potential assessments — were parked in first-notice status as of June 30, 2025. Collection management had asked for the pause back in March 2024 because of resource constraints, which quietly stopped the notices from advancing. TIGTA estimated that acting promptly on roughly 10,482 of those cases could have produced $321.3 million in tax that is still collectible.
The IRS agreed with all six recommendations and moved the stalled cases forward in March 2026, pointing to expanded use of analytics and automation. The practical read for anyone with an unfiled year sitting out there: the backlog was a timing problem, not a reprieve, and the cases are moving again. Filing voluntarily is still cheaper than being found.
Source: Journal of Accountancy
Looking Ahead
Two October Dates to Put on the Calendar Now
October 15 is a hard deadline in Tippecanoe County, and the gas tax holiday is currently set to end October 5.
October 15 is the final deadline for extended 2025 individual returns, and for Lafayette-area filers it really is the deadline — the August storm relief that pushed 21 Indiana counties to February 1, 2027 does not include Tippecanoe County. It’s also the last day to recharacterize a 2025 IRA contribution if you extended, which is the sort of thing that only gets noticed once the return is otherwise finished.
The other date is October 5, when the state’s suspension of the Gasoline Use Tax and Gasoline Excise Tax is currently set to lapse. Governor Braun has extended it once a month since August 7 and has said he’ll reevaluate roughly every 30 days, so it may well move again — but distributors filing the GT-103 should be planning for collection to resume rather than assuming another extension.
Source: Indiana DOR — Gasoline Use Tax