Still waiting for your stimulus check? Watch your mail
If you get a letter from the IRS this month, don’t panic. It could be good news.
The agency is trying to reach more than a quarter of a million Pennsylvania residents who haven’t received a coronavirus stimulus payment yet, and may be eligible but not know it.
The letters direct people to register for their payment by Oct. 15 on the IRS website, irs.gov/eip, using the “Non-Filers: Enter Your Payment Info Here” section. Recipients also can call 800-9199835.
The letters are being sent to people whomay qualify for a stimulus payment. The IRS may not have enough information on them because they didn’t file a federal income tax return for 2018 or 2019, likely because they weren’t required to.
That includes people whohave no income or minimal income (less than $12,200 or less than $24,400 for married couples filing jointly), and recipients of federal veterans pensions, railroad retirement benefits, Supplemental Security Income or Social Security retirement, disability or survivor payments.
To register, applicants will have to enter personal information including their birth date, Social Security number and bank account number if they want to be paid by direct deposit. Those who don’t request direct deposit will receive a check.
If you receive a letter, that doesn’t mean you’re automatically eligible for a payment. The IRS says you’re likely eligible if you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, have a work-eligible Social Security number and can’t be claimed as a dependent on someone else’s income tax return.
The letters are being sent among criticism that the IRS and Treasury Department haven’t done enough to determine who still hasn’t been paid their stimulus, formally known as an Economic Impact Payment.
By the end of July, about $273 billion had been paid to about 164 million people. But inadequate records at the IRS and Treasury have kept others who are eligible from being paid, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report Monday.
The GAO-recommended the Treasury and IRS update their estimate of people who haven’t filed yet for their payment, so community organizations such as volunteer tax counselors can try to get the word out in their areas.
Individuals who earn up to $75,000 annually will receive $1,200. Married couples who earn up to $150,000 will get $2,400. Those families will be paid $500 for each child who is under
17. Individuals and couples earning more than those amounts will receive reduced payments.
The stimulus payment process has not been ideal. It was bound to have problems because it was put together hastily. About a million dead people were sent checks worth $1.4 billion, while nearly 9 million eligible people nationwide still may be waiting to be paid.
Monday’s GAO audit noted that some victims of domestic violence may not have received their payment because it went to a bank account or address they could not access. Payments were stopped to about 700,000 people because their spouse had died and the government needed to rescind their spouse’s share. Payments also were stopped to an unknown number of people whose spouses were in jail, for the same reason, as inmates are not eligible.
The audit questioned why the IRS isn’t obtaining data from some federal agencies, such as recipients of Medicaid and food stamps, to identify eligible people who haven’t been paid. The IRS did tap data from some agencies, including Social Security, the Railroad Retirement Board and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The notification letters being mailed to about 276,000 Pennsylvanians — the eighth-most of any state — aren’t an ideal way to address the problem, but at least the government is making the effort.
They are problematic because some people may discard the letters as a scam, just as many people discarded prepaid debit cards that held their stimulus payments because they came with little warning and in envelopes with no connection to the government.
And scammers may try to cash in by creating fraudulent letters that they’ll circulate by mail, email and social media, to trick people into divulging their personal information on fake forms.
If you get an unsolicited phone call, email or message on Facebook asking you to provide information to obtain your stimulus, that’s a scam. The IRS is not reaching out to people in those ways. It is using the mail.
If you get a letter, consider it carefully. Look for misspelled words, poor grammar and other indications that the letter isn’t legitimate. Make sure it came from the IRS, and verify the address. Make sure you are on the IRS website before you enter your information. The web address will begin with “irs.gov” and have a padlock icon, indicating it is secure.
You can see what an official letter looks like at irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/n1444aes.pdf.