NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast · NerdWallet Personal Finance

Talking Taxes With a CPA: What's New in 2026 and How to Navigate Filing Season

March 23, 2026·33 min·15 clips

Have you filed? Sean and Elizabeth start with the familiar tax season split: do it yourself and learn as you go, or bring in a tax person. Then the episode gets down to filing 2025 taxes during tax season 2026, including what's new, where people slip up, and how to stay calm enough to catch mistakes. Sean admits a very human one. After a couple of Saturday morning hours filing, he was tired enough to hit submit without the extra pause he probably needed. The IRS accepted the return, but that did not mean every issue had disappeared. Tom O'Sabin sits with that moment. A return can be accepted and still deserve one last look. Rejections can also be pretty ordinary. A semi-adult child might file first, leave off dependent status, and accidentally block a parent from claiming them. Then the conversation turns to identity theft. Someone with a Social Security number and enough name information can file a false return that has little to do with real life. In O'Sabin's example, bad actors invent children, income, credits, and other details to chase a refund in the $7,000 to $12,000 range. The real taxpayer may not know until their own return gets rejected because the Social Security number was already used. The advice stays useful: pause before submitting, do not treat IRS acceptance as the whole story, and take a duplicate Social Security rejection seriously.

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