CP508C
hard deadline · rights expireNotice of Certification of Your Seriously Delinquent Federal Tax Debt to the State Department
The IRS has told the State Department you owe a seriously delinquent tax debt. Your passport application or renewal will be denied and an existing passport may be revoked.
No response is required, and there is no deadline. What there is instead is a clock on the way back out: the IRS notifies the State Department within 30 days of the debt being resolved, and expedited decertification takes roughly 9 to 16 days and requires travel within 45 days plus eligibility screening.
If it passes. Nothing further from the IRS. The consequence is at the passport counter.
Why you got it
A legally enforceable unpaid federal tax debt — including assessed penalties and interest — above $66,000 for calendar year 2026. The statutory base is $50,000, indexed and rounded to the nearest $1,000 under IRC § 7345(f). Because the figure includes penalties and interest, your TAX can be well under $66,000 while the certified debt is over it.
What rights it carries
You may bring a civil action in a United States district court or the Tax Court to have the certification declared erroneous — and, in the notice's own words, you are not required to contact the IRS or exhaust administrative remedies first. Reversal comes as a CP508R.
Do you have to respond?
No response required.
The mistake people make
Waiting until the passport is already denied. An instalment agreement in place BEFORE certification is a statutory bar; entered after, it is a 30-day unwind at best. Anyone with a balance approaching the threshold who is planning to relocate should be getting into an agreement now.
Excluded from certification: debt being paid timely under an instalment agreement or an accepted offer in compromise, debt under a Justice Department settlement, debt where collection is suspended because of a timely CDP levy hearing, and debt suspended by a pending innocent-spouse request. Administratively also excluded: currently-not-collectible hardship status, pending agreement or offer requests, identity-theft determinations, bankruptcy, a federally declared disaster area, and FBAR penalties — which are Title 31, not Title 26.
If crypto is why this arrived, the number on it is probably wrong.
Your exchange reports what you sold for and leaves the cost box blank, so any figure the IRS computes from it treats every coin as though it cost you nothing. Rebuild the basis from your own transaction history — free — and see the real number before the deadline above runs out.
Notices that arrive around this one
CP71C — The annual statement that you still owe, with the passport warning attached. The plain CP71 is the same reminder without it.Every notice in the library → Not sure it is really from the IRS? →
Sources: IRS — Understanding your CP508C notice · IRS — Revocation or denial of passport in case of certain unpaid taxes · Rev. Proc. 2025-32 § 4.60 (the 2026 figure) · IRC § 7345. Retrieved 2026-08-28. Where the IRS publishes no day count we say so rather than repeat a number we cannot source — the date printed on your own notice is the one that governs. ClearBasis is tax software, not a tax adviser, and this is information rather than advice.