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Neal Calls on IRS to Speed Up Impact Payment Notifications

Posted on Sep. 11, 2020

The House’s top taxwriter is urging the IRS to immediately begin sending notices to nonfilers who are eligible to receive economic impact payments rather than waiting until the end of the month.

“For months, the IRS has had all the information it needs to contact these individuals yet chose not to do so. Further delay is inexcusable,” House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., said in a September 10 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

Neal’s letter comes just two days after the IRS announced (IR-2020-203) that it would begin mailing letters around September 24 to about 9 million individuals who didn’t file a federal income tax return for either 2018 or 2019 and who may be eligible for, but have not registered to claim, an economic impact payment.

The IRS letter (Notice 1444-A) will explain that eligible individuals who aren’t required to file a 2019 return can go to the IRS website by October 15 to claim the economic impact payment. After October 15, nonfilers must file a 2020 tax return in 2021 and claim the payment as a credit, the IRS said.

Neal noted that he sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in July calling for improvements to the distribution of economic impact payments and noting that those who have struggled to access the payments are the most economically vulnerable Americans and are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

“Now, as the door is shutting, the IRS is sending a perfunctory letter by snail mail through the weakened U.S. Postal Service to educate individuals about emergency financial assistance to which they have been entitled since March,” Neal said in the latest letter. “I fail to understand why the information used for this mailing was not used earlier to prepare [economic impact] payments for these individuals.”

Neal also called on the IRS to extend the October 15 deadline for individuals to claim the payments on the website.

The economic income payments were established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (P.L. 116-136). Eligible individuals can receive up to $1,200 ($2,400 for joint filers), plus $500 per qualifying child under age 17. The IRS has said that more than 160 million Americans have received economic impact payments so far.

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