The Internal Revenue Service announced that it has disbursed another batch of $37 million Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) in the form of stimulus checks today. Last week the first batch of stimulus checks worth $90 million was disbursed. A total of $127 million in stimulus checks have been issued so far. Another 158.5 million households are eligible to receive automated payments in the next batch.
The second batch payments were sent to the eligible taxpayers who had filed their 2019 or 2020 tax returns. People who successfully used the Non-Filers tool, available on the IRS website were also sent payment in this batch.
The first batch of payments was disbursed via direct deposits. The second batch of payments included nearly 15 million paper checks and almost 5 million prepaid debit cards.
On the other hand, approximately 30 million social security beneficiaries are still waiting for their stimulus checks. Two weeks have passed since the American Rescue Act was signed into law and the beneficiaries still haven’t received the payments. Richard Neal who is the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee has blamed the Social Security Administration for the delay.
Rep. Neal wrote a letter to the Social Security Commissioner that the IRS had asked the SSA to send the necessary payment files to IRS two weeks prior to the American Rescue Plan became law on March 11, 2021. The SSA has still not provided the necessary files to the IRS. He has urged the commissioner to immediately send the vital information to the IRS by March 25, 2021.
For the federal beneficiaries who have not filed tax returns for year 2019 or 2020, and did not use the Non-Filers tool, the IRS is working with Social Security Administration, Veterans Administration, and the Railroad Retirement Board to obtain the essential updated information in order to ensure that the automatic payments are sent to the needy people as fast as possible.
The status of the third round of stimulus payments can be checked by using the IRS Get My Payment tool.
