San Diego, CA
The IRS has a method of ‘last resort' to collect overdue taxes: Revoking your passport
- By law, the IRS must notify the State Department if an individual’s federal tax debt is “seriously delinquent.”
- This is a large federal tax debt — of more than $62,000 in 2024 — that the taxpayer has repeatedly ignored.
- If taxpayers don’t remedy their overdue bill, the government will generally deny their passport application and can revoke or limit their active passport.
Travelers, be warned: The federal government may revoke your passport if you ignore a big tax bill.
Such punishments have become more frequent in recent years, experts said.
Federal law requires the IRS and Treasury Department to notify the State Department if an American has a “seriously delinquent tax debt.”
This is a large federal debt — of more than $62,000 in 2024 — that the taxpayer has repeatedly ignored.
The debt threshold includes aggregate total federal tax liabilities, plus penalties and interest, levied against an individual. It’s adjusted annually for inflation.
The State Department generally won’t issue a new passport and may revoke or limit an existing one in cases of serious delinquency, according to the IRS.
The government typically uses this enforcement mechanism — which has been in place since 2018 — as a sort of last-ditch effort to collect unpaid tax levies, experts said.
Should those debts remain unpaid, the potential consequences are ample: Travelers might not be able to take trips overseas until they’ve resolved their debt. Expats and those who travel abroad for business may have to return to U.S. soil indefinitely until their tax case concludes, for example, experts said.
Revoking a passport is “a step of last resort,” said Troy Lewis, a certified public accountant based in Draper, Utah, and an accounting and tax professor at Brigham Young University.
“How do you get rich folks’ attention regarding paying their taxes? Just make sure they can’t summer in Europe,” he said.
‘It gets people to call the IRS’
Demand to travel abroad has surged as the Covid-19 pandemic has waned. Americans applied for about 21.6 million U.S. passports in fiscal 2023 — a record number, according to the State Department.
Todd Whalen, a CPA based in Denver, has seen tax enforcement efforts involving passports ramp up over the past three years.
“This is becoming more and more of a big deal,” said Whalen, founder of Advanced Tax Solutions, which helps consumers and businesses resolve tax debts. “We’ve gotten several [cases] this year.”
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In one instance, a client only found out his passport had been revoked while at the airport trying to fly to Mexico for a trip to celebrate his son’s high school graduation.
“It works,” Whalen said of the collection effort. “It gets people to call [the IRS].”
A State Department spokesperson declined to provide annual statistics on how many taxpayers had their passports revoked or denied. The IRS didn’t comment by press time.
All other collections must have been ‘exhausted’
It can be “quite easy” for overdue tax debts to exceed the $62,000 threshold, according to Virginia La Torre Jeker, an attorney who specializes in U.S. international tax law.
Americans living abroad, for example, may have “significant penalties” for not filing various foreign information returns, she said in an email.
Debts can also include any tax levies owed by individuals, she added. Those may be business taxes for which the taxpayer is personally liable or trust fund recovery penalties, she said. (The latter relate to withheld income and employment taxes like Social Security taxes or railroad retirement taxes.)
However, revoking a passport isn’t generally the government’s first way to collect such overdue debts, experts said.
The IRS must have already “exhausted” all other typical collection activities, said Lewis, owner of Lewis & Associates, CPAs.
Generally, that would mean the taxpayer hasn’t responded to prior IRS notices of a federal tax lien, for example. (A lien is the government’s legal claim to a debtor’s assets like real estate and other personal property. It isn’t a move to collect said property, though.)
Various courts have upheld the federal government’s ability to revoke passports in order to collect tax debts as constitutional, Lewis said.
He pointed to two recent cases as examples: Franklin v. United States in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and Maehr v. United States Department of State in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.
In the former, the defendant, James Franklin, owed about $422,000 in taxes for failing to file accurate tax returns and report a foreign trust of which he was the beneficial owner. The IRS ultimately filed a tax lien and levied his Social Security benefits, and the State Department later revoked his passport.
“It seems pretty well established this is something [the government] can do,” Lewis said.
Travelers have remedies available
The State Department doesn’t revoke a passport straight away. When the IRS certifies debt as seriously delinquent and alerts the State Department of that, it will mail the taxpayer a notice — CP508C — outlining the potential implications of that classification.
If an individual then applies for a passport, the State Department would generally deny and close that application if the person doesn’t make efforts to pay their debts. Such efforts might include paying the balance in full, entering into a payment plan or making a compromise agreement with the IRS.
The debtor would still be able to use an active passport, if they have one, unless notified in writing by the State Department that their passport had been revoked or limited, the IRS said.
“IRS looks at various factors, including taxpayer noncompliance in the past and taxpayer failure to cooperate with the IRS” when opting to revoke a passport, according to La Torre Jeker.
The State Department can limit the passport’s use only to return travel to the U.S., thereby preventing the person “from being trapped in limbo” if outside the country, she said.
The IRS sends taxpayers Letter 6152 before revocation, asking them to call the IRS within 30 days in order to resolve their account and avoid passport cancellation, she added.
Still, sometimes passport denial catches debtors by surprise when they travel, said Whalen at Advanced Tax Solutions.
For example, the IRS may have the wrong address on file — especially if a taxpayer has moved — and mail notices to the wrong place, Whalen said.
“A lot of times, they don’t know they have a balance due until they … show up at the airport,” he said.
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San Diego, CA
Feds Will Finally Help Oceanside 73 Years After Admitting Fault for Its Disappearing Beaches
When the U.S. military built the Camp Pendleton Harbor complex just north of Oceanside in 1942, it didn’t set out to steal Oceanside’s beaches for decades to come.
But that’s exactly what’s been happening for the past 73 years.
In 1953, the federal government admitted that construction of harbor jetties at Camp Pendleton was directly contributing to the erosion of Oceanside’s beaches. The jetties block the ocean’s currents that carry sand along the coast, which causes Oceanside’s beaches south of the military base to lose out on sand that would have naturally flowed to them.
Rising sea levels caused by climate change also play a part, but in Oceanside, naturally occurring erosion has been exacerbated by the military base.
But the military is only just now stepping in to help. While the government’s admission of guilt seemed like a win, it somewhat backfired; because the federal government was on the hook for the entire cost, the project got swallowed by a bureaucratic black hole. Tired of waiting, Oceanside launched its own plan to save its beaches, one the military now refuses to help fund.
What Took so Long
In 2000, Congress passed a law mandating the Army Corps to study how it could restore Oceanside’s beaches to pre-harbor conditions.
The government was supposed to pay for the study and complete it in 44 months. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finally released the draft report of the study earlier this month – 26 years later.“Studies require both authorization and funding,” said Shawn Davis, public affairs specialist for the Army Corps, via email. “While the study was initially authorized in 2000, there have been gaps in funding that have impacted the timeline to complete the study.”
Those funding gaps happened until 2022 when Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, whose district includes much of North County’s coastal cities, helped secure $1.8 million in federal funding and another $2.27 million in 2025 to complete the study.
So, why did the funding dry up for so long at the federal level? According to Davis, “federal projects can only proceed and continue with appropriations from Congress.”
In other words, the project was stuck in bureaucratic limbo; it had the legal authorization to exist, but it couldn’t secure funds in a highly competitive budget that favored bigger projects.
Jayme Timberlake, Oceanside’s coastal zone administrator, told Voice of San Diego that the city and its representatives tried lobbying Congress for years, but there are often a lot of unknowns when it comes to Army Corps projects.
“It’s very political. It’s very much dependent on what the rest of the nation is going through and where the funds are going and how they’re getting allocated,” Timberlake said. “It’s very tough to navigate and there’s a lot of risk associated with it, meaning we can’t really rely on it.”
Other coastal cities received a plan before Oceanside did: The Corps completed similar studies for two sand replenishment efforts. One is a joint effort in Encinitas and Solana Beach, the other in San Clemente. Congress has already approved both of these projects for sand deliveries every seven to 10 years for the next 50 years.
“The difference is that the … projects that are happening in Encinitas, Solana Beach and San Clemente were initiated by a request to the Army Corps from these cites, and they were cost shared,” Timberlake said.
That means these cities are paying 35 percent of the costs, and the federal government is paying 65 percent. That also applies to sand deliveries every seven to 10 years. These types of projects can cost upwards of $100 million.
“In Oceanside, our mitigation project, at least the study was not cost shared. It was the full responsibility of the federal government because they admitted fault,” Timberlake said. “So, it’s really unfortunate that the mitigation for Oceanside beaches didn’t happen before those requested projects.”
Meanwhile, Oceanside’s Sand Was Disappearing
While Oceanside officials and residents waited for the government’s help, the city’s beaches were rapidly disappearing before their eyes.
Previous Army Corps studies estimate the Harbor has caused a loss of 1.4 to 1.6 million cubic yards of sand volume from Oceanside’s beaches since 1942, with some areas retreating at a rate of 6.6 feet per year. That’s 84 years of consistent and severe sand loss.
El Niño conditions over the years have also exacerbated the problem.
“There was such a dramatic loss of sand that the community really started asking for solutions,” Timberlake said. “There’s a whole generation that has been able to use the beach and then have it be gone, so it has triggered a lot of community interest.”
After 20 years of waiting, Oceanside decided to take matters into its own hands.
“Once there was momentum to fix the problem itself and not rely on the Army Corps any further, the city did a feasibility study in 2020, and that study really unearthed all the possible things that Oceanside could do in the short and long term to fix its beaches,” Timberlake said.
A few years later, city officials held a competition that brought together three design teams from around the world to develop sand retention pilot projects. They chose a concept that includes the construction of two headlands that will aim to stabilize sand on the back beach, with an offshore artificial reef aimed at slowing down nearshore erosive forces.
The project is called RE:Beach and it’s already funded up to the construction phase, Timberlake said. The city has applied for a few different grants to cover construction, which will cost upwards of $60 million.
Timberlake said the city asked the Army Corps to help fund the rest of the RE:Beach project, and the Army Corps denied the request.
The Government’s Plan
Oceanside’s RE:Beach project and the federal government’s recent recommendations won’t conflict with each other, Timberlake said. In fact, the two projects will complement one another.
The Army Corps’ draft feasibility report identified beach nourishment (a lot of sand) as the tentatively selected plan to restore Oceanside’s beaches.
It calls for dredging 4 million cubic yards of sand from an offshore borrow site and then placing it along Oceanside’s beaches, with the goal of sustaining a minimum 85-foot wide beach from Oceanside Harbor south to Buena Vista Lagoon. Sand replenishment would be 1 million cubic yards the first cycle, then repeated every 10 years.
Realistically, though, it could be another couple decades before Oceanside’s beaches start receiving sand, Timberlake said.
That’s because there are other competing projects the Army Corps is working on. Plus,, Congress still has to appropriate funding for the rest of the project to move forward once the feasibility study is completed. Initial costs of construction are currently estimated to be $243,540,000, Davis, spokesperson for the Army Corps, said via email.
It’s still unclear if the government will cover the full costs of construction and the subsequent sand renourishments for Oceanside, but Levin told Voice he thinks it’s unlikely.
“I will advocate for every penny to come from the federal government, given that the government did acknowledge responsibility,” Levin said. “But I do also know how the Army Corps works, and it’s very likely they’ll want some sort of cost share.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is proposing major funding cuts to the Army Corps’ budget for fiscal year 2027. If those cuts are approved by Congress, it could have an impact on projects like this one.
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