Dead people can still receive $ 600 stimulus checks

The dead may receive some of the $ 600 stimulus checks that the federal government began issuing on Tuesday night.

This would reflect what happened last spring, when deceased individuals were among the recipients of a previous round of direct payments of up to $ 1,200 per person.

More than 1 million deceased have received a $ 1.4 billion check by the end of April, according to the Government Accountability Office. The IRS asked for that money back, leading to confusion and lashes for heirs such as surviving spouses and family members.

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Now, a $ 900 billion Covid aid package, which President Donald Trump signed on Sunday, could create a similar situation, although Congress has put a firewall in place to limit its scope, according to tax experts.

The IRS and the Treasury Department did not return a request for comment.

The law, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021, provides for a one-time payment of up to $ 600 per person and $ 600 per dependent child. A family of four, for example, can earn up to $ 2,400.

But the measure does not allow people who died before January 1, 2020 to receive a payment.

This safeguard is new, according to Janet Holtzblatt, senior researcher at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and former Treasury official. The CARES Act was silent on the point of payments to deceased people, she said – an omission that led people who filed tax returns for 2018 and 2019, but later died, to receive checks.

“Now, they dealt explicitly with the issue of deceased people,” said Holtzblatt of the new law. “[But] does not talk about those who died in 2020. “

This means that people who died this year should receive a check for $ 600 if they are eligible for one, according to Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group.

This year is set to be the deadliest in US history, with deaths estimated at 3 million (including non-Covid cases) for the first time.

It is also possible that someone who died in 2019 will receive a stimulus check, if updated information from tax forms, the Social Security Administration or other databases is not readily available to the IRS at the time a check for $ 600 is issued, Olson said.

In such cases, the agency will not know that someone is dead when paying.

“Mistakes are going to happen,” said Olson. “But they will be few and far between.”

The maximum stimulus payment will initially go to those who made $ 75,000 or less in 2019, as per last year’s tax return.

The IRS knowingly paid $ 1,200 to dead people through the previous payment round in the spring, according to a government accountability report published in June.

The agency was following its procedure during the Great Recession, when the government also issued stimulus checks to deceased Americans, the report said.

The tax agency, along with the Treasury Department, later determined that these payments were improper, GAO said. On May 6, the IRS asked the heirs to return the money. (The same was asked of incarcerated individuals.)

But as with the last time, the IRS does not have many legal remedies to force people to repay $ 600 stimulus checks if, in the end, it is considered to have been issued in error, said Olson.

The agency could ask the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against an heir or estate that did not refund a stimulus payment, but that is unlikely, Olson said.

“They bring so few of them under normal circumstances,” she said of the Justice Department.