The Internal Revenue Service is urging taxpayers who want to receive their economic impact payments by direct deposit to register their information by next Wednesday, May 13, at noon, or else they will have to wait longer to receive the payment by check.
Taxpayers can visit the Get My Payment tool on IRS.gov to check on the status of their payment and input their direct deposit information if they haven’t received it yet.
“We’re working hard to get more payments quickly to taxpayers,” said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig (pictured) in a statement Friday. “We want people to visit Get My Payment before the noon Wednesday deadline so they can provide their direct deposit information. Time is running out for a chance to get these payments several weeks earlier through direct deposit.”
After noon Wednesday, the IRS will begin preparing millions of files to send to the Bureau of Fiscal Services for paper checks that will start arriving through late May and into June.
The Get My Payment tool gives eligible taxpayers a projected deposit date for their payment. The information is updated once each day, usually overnight. Taxpayers who didn’t choose direct deposit on their last tax return can use the tool to enter their bank account information to receive their payment by direct deposit, which will speed up receipt.
For those people who aren’t required to file a federal tax return, the Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here tool helps them submit basic information to receive a payment in their bank account. The tool was developed in partnership between the IRS and the Free File Alliance and is aimed at those people who don’t receive Social Security retirement, survivor or disability benefits, Railroad Retirement benefits, Supplemental Security Income and VA Compensation and Pension benefits. The non-filers tool is also available in Spanish.
There have been issues with the stimulus payments, with many taxpayers complaining they haven’t received the payments, or they have been getting the wrong amounts. The economic impact payments were included as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March in response to the economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. They provide $1,200 to individual taxpayers and $2,400 to couples plus an extra $500 per dependent child.
The IRS has been using the direct deposit information from taxpayers’ 2018 and 2019 tax returns when it’s available. However, in some cases, the payments have been sent to the temporary bank accounts set up by tax preparation chains for their customers, instead of to the taxpayers’ own bank accounts, and those payments have needed to be returned to the IRS. In many cases, the payments didn’t include the extra money for the taxpayers’ children, and those parents may need to wait until next year to receive that money. Taxpayers who don’t have direct deposit information can still receive paper checks, but those will take longer to deliver, though the IRS is now working to expedite the process, while contending with the fact that most of its employees are now working remotely.
The IRS is working in tandem with the Treasury Department and the Bureau of Fiscal Services to speed up the process of getting the stimulus payments delivered to more people as quickly as possible. Approximately 130 million individuals have already received payments worth more than $200 billion in the program’s first four weeks, according to the IRS.
Starting later this month, the IRS is promising that the number of paper checks being delivered to taxpayers will increase sharply. The IRS needed to reprogram its systems to add President Donald Trump’s name to the bottom of each check. In addition, for taxpayers who received their stimulus payments by direct deposit, a separate letter signed by Trump has been going out to them in the mail.
The IRS is also warning taxpayers to beware of scams related to the economic impact payments. To use the new app or get information about the payments, taxpayers should directly visit IRS.gov. Scammers may be using email, phone calls or texts related to the payments so taxpayers and preparers should be cautious. The IRS never sends unsolicited electronic communications asking people to open attachments, visit a website or share personal or financial information.