The IRS has corrected the comment deadline on its proposed Opportunity Zone information-reporting regulations (REG-116506-25) from October 16 to October 26, 2026. The proposal, published September 11, would put into effect the new reporting rules Congress added for Qualified Opportunity Funds and Qualified Opportunity Zone Businesses in 2025. Funds would file an annual information return on Form 8996 and send statements to investors who dispose of their interests. Businesses would send statements to the funds that hold them, and penalties for late or incomplete fund returns run $500 a day. The proposal also lets a fund revoke a self-certification filed by mistake and sets out a formal way to voluntarily decertify. The November 5 telephone hearing is unchanged, and requests to speak are still due October 13.
The change. A correction published in the Federal Register on September 28, 2026 (91 FR 61175) changes the comment deadline in the proposed regulations from “October 16, 2026” to “October 26, 2026.” The underlying notice of proposed rulemaking, REG-116506-25, was published September 11, 2026 (91 FR 57968). The Regulations.gov docket, IRS-2026-1223, now shows the comment period closing at the end of the day on October 26, and comments can be filed on Regulations.gov under REG-116506-25. The IRS lists the proposal on its Opportunity Zones page. Bloomberg Tax reported the correction on September 29.
Hearing dates did not move. The correction changes only the comment date. Under the original notice, a telephone public hearing is set for November 5, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. ET. Requests to speak and topic outlines are due October 13, 2026, and the IRS says it will cancel the hearing if no outlines arrive by then. Requests to attend are due by 5 p.m. ET on November 3. As of October 3, the Federal Register lists the September 28 correction as the only change to the notice, with no further correction and no hearing cancellation.
What the rules cover. The proposal would carry out sections 6039K and 6039L, which the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added to the tax code. Every QOF would file an annual information return on Form 8996 (or a successor form) and furnish statements to investors who dispose of some or all of their investment. Every applicable QOZB would furnish a statement to the QOFs that hold its stock or partnership interests, so the funds can complete their own returns. Reporting would include, by census tract, a physical address, a NAICS code, full-time-equivalent employees, the value of real property and the number of residential units. Several of these items are reported as of December 31 so the IRS can publish the annual public OZ reports the law requires.
Penalties. The preamble describes the new section 6726 penalty for a QOF that fails to file a complete and correct return: $500 a day, capped at $10,000 per return, or $50,000 for a fund with more than $10 million in gross assets. For intentional disregard, the penalty rises to $2,500 a day with caps of $50,000, or $250,000 for a large fund. All of those amounts are adjusted for inflation. Investor and QOZB statements count as payee statements under section 6722, which carries a $250-per-statement penalty, also adjusted for inflation. Reasonable-cause relief under section 6724 applies to both.
Fixing a mistaken certification. The proposal would let an entity that self-certified as a QOF by mistake revoke that election with the IRS Commissioner’s consent, but only if no qualifying investment was ever made in it. An entity that revokes could never self-certify again, and its taxpayer ID could not be used for another QOF.
Voluntary decertification. A QOF that wants to decertify would need contemporaneous written documentation, such as meeting minutes, naming the last month it is a QOF. It would file a final Form 8996 and notify every investor within 15 days. Under the proposal, decertification is an inclusion event for investors, who could no longer make the 10-year basis election. The 15-day notice is meant to give them time to reinvest the gain in another QOF within the usual 180-day window.
When it would apply. The notice says the section 6039K return and investor-statement rules would apply to returns and statements originally due on or after the date the rules are published as final regulations. Section 1.6039K-1(e), which will cover rural QOFs and rural QOZBs, is reserved for later.
Why it matters for investors. The 2025 law kept the 10% basis step-up for qualifying investments held five years (per the proposal’s summary of the law), and investments made on or after January 1, 2027 through a qualified rural opportunity fund get 30%, as our guide to investing in Opportunity Zones starting January 1, 2027 explains. These rules decide what funds must report to keep those benefits clean. Sponsors raising for 2027 now have until October 26 to comment. Track state nominations on the OZ 2.0 nomination tracker.
Original reporting by Marcus Delgado for Opportunity Zone Invest, an independent OZ 2.0 research site. Facts are drawn from the primary sources cited above per our editorial standards. Nothing here is tax, legal, or investment advice.
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