The Internal Revenue Service urged taxpayers to secure their tax and financial paperwork ahead of a disaster in IR-2026-104, issued September 3, 2026, as part of National Preparedness Month. The reminder targeted individuals, businesses, and tax professionals alike.
For a sole proprietor, the advice carries more weight than it does for a W-2 household. Your business records and your personal records usually live in the same filing cabinet, so losing them takes out your deductions, your insurance claim, and your loan documentation all at once.
What The IRS Is Recommending
The agency laid out five steps. Store the originals you cannot replace, including prior returns, property titles, insurance policies, Social Security cards, and birth certificates, inside containers rated for water and fire, and scan the paper so an electronic copy sits on a secure device or in the cloud.
Photograph or film what you own. The IRS said pictures of your home, work vehicle, business premises, and other property can support a loss claim for both tax and insurance purposes, and it pointed to its disaster loss workbooks for building a room-by-room inventory of belongings and equipment.
The agency also told taxpayers to refresh emergency plans each year using Ready.gov checklists, and to confirm they know how to retrieve their records through IRS Individual Online Account, which holds transcripts, notices, and account history.
Why This Matters For Self-Employed Owners
Rebuilding a Schedule C after a fire or a flood is a specific kind of misery. Mileage logs, receipt piles, equipment purchase records, and client invoices are exactly the documents that substantiate your deductions, and they are rarely duplicated anywhere else.
Equipment inventories are the step most solo owners skip. A photographer’s lenses, a contractor’s tools, and a baker’s ovens are all business property, and Publication 584-B exists specifically as a business casualty and theft loss workbook for cataloging them before anything happens.
The release also flagged a payroll detail worth checking if you employ anyone or run your own pay through a service. The IRS advised employers using a payroll provider to ask whether that provider carries a fiduciary bond, and noted that eligible businesses can use Business Tax Account to check balances, submit payments, and pull up past payment history, a tool we covered when the IRS expanded its Business Tax Account features last month.
What Self-Employed Owners Should Do Next
Spend an hour this week scanning the paper you cannot replace and putting a copy somewhere that is not your house. Encrypted cloud storage works, and so does a drive kept at a different address, but either one beats a single box in a closet.
Then walk your workspace while recording on your phone. Narrate what each item is and roughly what it cost, because a video with commentary is far more useful to an adjuster and to your accountant than a folder of unlabeled photos.
Finally, set up or log into your IRS Online Account before you need it. Identity verification takes time you will not have in the days after an evacuation, and having transcripts on hand is what lets you file, amend, or document a casualty loss.
What To Watch Next
Watch for IRS disaster declarations that cover your county. Relief is generally automatic when your address of record falls inside a covered disaster area, and it postpones filing and payment deadlines that land within the relief window.
If your records sit inside a disaster zone but you do not, you must request relief rather than receive it. The IRS said those taxpayers should call its Special Services Hotline at 866-562-5227, and Publication 547 explains how to claim uninsured or unreimbursed losses on a federal return.
Photo by Invest Europe: Unsplash
