How a ‘seriously delinquent tax debt’ could get your passport revoked

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.

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In one instance, a client only found out his passport had been revoked while at the airport trying to fly to Mexico for a trip to celebrate his son’s high school graduation.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.

Americans living abroad, for example, may have…