Recently, joint research from the Internal Revenue Service and the Urban-Brookings Institute highlighted the results of many IRS enforcement activities, including the impact of past years’ changes to IRS Collection policy. It is no secret that the IRS has been kinder and gentler to tax debtors during the past five years.

The 2012 Fresh Start Initiative and the relaxing of lien filings and levies during the past five years has relieved burden on taxpayers and the resource-constrained IRS. However, this more relaxed policy hasn’t resulted in maximizing collection for the U.S. Treasury. The IRS continues to tweak its collection policies and procedures to collect the most tax dollars.

During the past five years, new laws and IRS administrative changes to collection policy have been frequent, and can be hard for taxpayers and tax professionals to keep up with. This year has been no exception; in fact, 2017 has seen these six important changes to IRS collection policy.