MCLEAN, Va. — Sandra Okafor has prepared taxes for twenty-two years out of a strip-mall office between a nail salon and a shuttered travel agency, and in that time she has learned that the Internal Revenue Service does not ask questions. It informs.

So when the draft of the 2026 Form 1040 arrived at her office with a citizenship checkbox printed on page one — the first time the main tax return has ever asked filers to declare their status — Okafor did not gasp. She bought more sheet protectors.

“Everyone in this country is either a citizen, a legal resident, or three forms away from being one of the first two,” she said. “The form is just catching up to the paperwork.”

The draft asks filers, and their spouses if filing jointly, whether they are U.S. citizens or nationals, or lawfully present and authorized to work. The question sits on page one, above income, where the form has historically been polite. The declaration carries the force of a perjury penalty, which is how the government says it knows you mean it.

Okafor’s regulars have reacted the way Americans react to any new box: by producing documents they were told to stop carrying. A retired postal worker brought his birth certificate, issued in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1958, in a bank sleeve so old the corner folded itself. A nurse who has filed from the same address for eleven years asked Okafor whether her W-2 counts as a passport. It does not. She asked whether her mother counts. Okafor said not legally.

The change arrives alongside a Treasury rule tying refundable credits to the declaration, which supporters call common sense and accountants call Thursday. The IRS has released several draft documents asking the citizenship question in various places, which tax professionals describe as the agency “trying it on,” the way a teenager tries on a jacket in the driveway.

What makes the box remarkable is not its difficulty. Checking a box to confirm you were born in Kansas takes less than four seconds. What makes it remarkable is that the agency requesting the confirmation is the same agency that has your name, your address, your birthday, your wages, your refunds, your deductions, your 2014 audit, and a direct-deposit record of every dollar the government has ever handed you.

“I filled out a 1040-EZ in 1998 and they found me a discrepancy in Ohio,” the postal worker said, sliding his birth certificate back into his jacket. “Now they want me to tell them who I am. I’m the guy with the discrepancy.”

Okafor expects her clients to be fine. She expects them to arrive with folders anyway, and folders, she said, are how the season actually works. She has a filing cabinet from 2003 that contains nothing but folders of documents people brought to prove things nobody had asked about.

She keeps the cabinet unlocked. She says it’s for the records. She does not say what kind.