AMERICANS are letting over $1.77billion worth of Covid-19 cash go unclaimed.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records show that the country turned away or simply failed to cash 1,315,717 checks – that’s a whopping $1.77billion of unclaimed stimulus from the first round of stimulus checks issued during former President Donald Trump’s fiscal response to the pandemic.
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The forsaken amount was tallied after IRS released records to KDVR.
It’s the same cost estimated to build the California bullet train project and matches the construction bottom line to erect the new 65,000 seat Las Vegas Raiders NFL stadium.
Predictably, the five most populist US states left $650million of the total on the table.
California claimed the title with the most uncashed stimulus checks with 130,243, followed by Florida with 96,342 and Texas was third with 96,918. New York and Pennsylvania followed close behind, according to KDVR.
The money is part of the financial relief supplied by the federal government as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan secured by President Joe Biden.
In order to not let it go to waste, there are some key ways to collect.
Already, Americans who have been suffering the financial blows brought on by the pandemic have seen more than 163million payments sent out worth approximately $390billion.
There are also $10,200 refunds coming to Americans who have filed unemployment taxes earlier this year and earned less than $150,000 in modified adjusted gross income.
Still, with all of the chances to collect, many continue to wait for their stimulus check to arrive or don’t realize that they may be entitled to collect.
With tax returns being pushed to May 15, the IRS started doling out stimulus payments “on a weekly basis” to limit errors and avoid an overwhelming backlog, the IRS stated in March.
As of last month, the most recent third-round sendout, Covid-19 relief checks reached $4.2billion.
There were more than 1.2million direct deposits and about 1.1million paper checks of Economic Impact Payments (EIP) that arrived through snail mail, Yahoo! News confirmed.
The IRS Get My Payment supports eligible individuals and families get daily updates on their stimulus check statuses.
If any issue arises with overpayment the site provides alerts and details to help people resolve them.
The agency encourages people to create an IRS account, which helps parse through key details regarding past and present tax filings to help figure out the status of the stimulus.
The IRS determines eligibility based largely on tax returns.
So if you have fallen off the books or moved or had a radical life change, they cropped a tax software program to get current and then possibly make it easier for a check to be sent.
And should a paper check or EIP debit card be the form of payment coming in the post, then there’s a nifty tool that the US Postal Office tool called Informed Delivery.
