IRS’s old technology could delay checks
Expert warns delivery in ‘months, not weeks’
WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is promising that millions of Americans will receive $1,200 stimulus checks in just two weeks, but some tax experts and congressional officials are warning it might take much longer.
Antiquated technology and staff reductions at the Internal Revenue Service have hampered the agency’s ability to process checks in such a short period and could mean delays in sending the money to anxious Americans who are counting on the cash to get them through hard times caused by the pandemic, experts said.
“There are going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to take a while, and I think it’s going to be measured in terms of months, not weeks,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center.
The checks are part of a $2.2 trillion economic recovery package President Donald Trump signed into law last week to provide a quick cash infusion to Americans hurt financially by the coronavirus crisis.But the administration’s timeline for getting the stimulus checks into the hands of Americans is once again calling attention to aging technology and other problems that have shadowed the IRS for years.
The Treasury Department insists that 50 million to 70 million Americans will get their payments via direct deposit by April 15 and that most of those who are eligible will get their checks within three weeks. Americans whose bank account information is not in the government’s system might have to wait longer, Treasury said.
But a memo distributed by House Democrats on Thursday warned some Americans could wait up to 20 weeks before they receive their checks.
Adding to the IRS’s pressures are staffing issues – the agency’s workforce shrank by 20% over the past decade – and limitations caused by its aging tax-processing apparatus.
The IRS’s information technology systems are among the oldest in the federal government. Two of its database systems – one master file that holds the record of all taxpayers and another that contains records of business tax accounts – date to the 1960s.