As per a recent US Treasury watchdog study, the IRS smoothed out the kinks in promptly delivering stimulus checks on a huge scale by the third round – at least, for the most part.
Following its assessment of 175 million 3rd ,400 stimulus check distributions to even more than 167 million persons, the Government Inspector General for Tax System (TIGTA) reported Thursday that the IRS accurately counted the amounts for 166.
6 million inhabitants with a reliability rating of 99.48 percent.
Inaccurate Payments
Despite this, the IRS sent out over 1.2 million potentially inaccurate payments for $1.9 billion, according to the watchdog. Meanwhile, approximately 645,000 people who may be qualified for third-round stimulus payouts totaling $1.6 billion could be waiting.
According to TIGTA inspectors, the erroneous stimulus-check funds comprised 9,592 payouts to deceased persons for whom the IRS had such date of death preceding payment. (Those who died before January 1, 2021, were not eligible for payment, which approved the third round of checks.) TIGTA investigators estimated that the transactions totaled around $13 million to $14 million.
They stated that programming flaws resulted in nearly 45,000 payments to deceased relatives, costing $64 million. Misguided payments in the millions or billions are significant, but they pale in relation to the total of potentially incorrect payments made in the spring and early summer of 2020 when the epidemic was still in its early phases, reports Market Watch.
The Report
TIGTA inspectors reported in March that the IRS had sent 4.45 million potentially inaccurate stimulus accumulative after the first round, at a value of $5.5 billion. This included 2.17 million payments totaling over $3.5 billion to deceased individuals, according to IRS statistics.
The $600 current phase of stimulus checks, which began to be distributed in late December 2020, would have their own set of issues. For example, according to a TIGTA review released in May, an IRS data error resulted in nearly 13 million second-round payouts to provisional bank accounts.
The return is initially delivered to such temporary savings accounts, which tax corporations set up before the balance — minus the company’s costs — is sent to the user’s bank account.
