$1.4 billion in stimulus checks went to more than a million dead people, watchdog says
The Internal Revenue Service sent almost $1.4 billion in coronavirus relief payments to 1.1 million dead Americans, according to a new Government Accountability Office report released Thursday.
In the report to Congress, the GAO said the IRS typically uses death records from the Social Security Administration to weed out fraudulent tax refund claims. But the IRS and the Treasury Department “did not use the death records to stop payments to deceased individuals” when it sent out the first batches of stimulus checks this spring, according to the report.
The first three batches of money from the CARES Act accounted for 72% of the funds the IRS sent out for individual economic recovery payments.
IRS officials told the watchdog agency that it began to ask the Treasury Department about issues with accidentally sending money to dead people before the legislation was complete.
Lawyers with the department decided the “IRS did not have the legal authority to deny payments to those who filed a return for 2019, even if they were deceased at the time of payment.” They said the same thing applied to people who filed a 2018 return.
“On May 6, 2020, IRS announced on its website that if a payment was issued to a decedent or incarcerated individual, the total amount should be returned. However, IRS does not currently plan to take additional steps to notify ineligible recipients on how to return payments,” The GAO said.
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 10:29 AM with the headline "$1.4 billion in stimulus checks went to more than a million dead people, watchdog says."
