How Does IRS Tax Debt Affect Your Passport and Your Ability to Travel or Live Overseas?

So recently the government passed a program and the program states that if you have seriously delinquent tax debt and if you don't have a resolution in place or otherwise in compliance, then the IRS can report you to the State Department and the State Department can essentially revoke your passport. So what serious means is serious usually means liabilities of $50,000 or more that have gone unresolved. The biggest problem with this is number one, nobody likes to be inconvenienced by having somebody revoke your passport. So for anybody with a liability, we strongly encourage you to get in compliance so that your passport is not addressed. But the bigger problem is with people who live overseas. So expats who live in various countries, if their passport gets revoked, then technically they can get deported and they can either be held indefinitely or for an extended period of time and/or pay huge fines and/or other things. So for people who live overseas, this is a huge problem. You want to make sure that you're in tax compliance, you want to make sure that you're taking active steps to resolve your tax issues because if you don't, there is the risk that you will get reported to the State Department and your passport will get revoked and then you won't be able to travel overseas.

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Sam Brotman, JD, LLM, MBA

Owner and Director of Legal
Brotman Law

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