14 ms·

IRS says its own error sent $1,200 stimulus checks to non-Americans overseas

223 points by brundolf 6y ago

kylehotchkiss 6y ago
Meanwhile, actual US citizens who were married to somebody with an ITIN (for example, my wife is in the process of getting her immigrant visa and green card), got $0 stimulus money whatsoever. Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Yes, it also penalized attending college.
- Natsu 6y ago
  It seemed to work for those with a green card, at least, though I was sort of worried that it would be counted as 'public assistance' for the purposes of the 'public charge' rule that's now being enforced. Seems that it's not being considered as such, though, at least according to the lawyer I talked to.
  - kylehotchkiss 6y ago
    So long as you got your SSN (which I hear are printed much faster than green cards) you should have gotten it. Thankfully public charge rule is on the way out, and I wish you a smooth journey to citizenship without that policy looming much longer :D
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    Nah, the public charge rule refers to a specific set of federal benefits. This legislatively created extra tax refund is not one of those.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      I figured that it would make no sense to count it as such, but I also thought it made no sense to require every field on each immigration form to be filled out. With PDF form validation being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised to see people listed as having 5 kids named NA NA NA in USCIS records in the future.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Claim it on your taxes... the $1200 was just basically a tax credit given ahead of time. If you qualify, you can claim it in January... won't help you today :(
  - pc86 6y ago
    But they don't qualify, that's the point. If you have an ITIN you don't qualify for this kind of tax credit.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    The rules are even weirder than that. The advance tax credit doesn't have to be repaid even if 2020 income makes one qualify for a smaller amount than actually received or for no payment at all. But if 2020 income is low enough to qualify for a higher payment, you do get to claim the difference on the 2020 tax return. Even weirder, if your payment would be different between 2018 and 2019 income, the actual payment the law granted earlier this year depended on which returns had been filed at the time the IRS determined eligibility, with no adjustment for subsequent filings. I qualified for my full payment based on my 2018 income, would not have qualified for anything based on my 2019 income, and did not expect to qualify for 2020 either (although the impact of the pandemic means I actually would). I made sure not to file my 2019 tax return until after I got my payment. Very badly designed legislation, though there may not have been much alternative if they wanted to act quickly.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      Well huzzah for year over year poverty. Being caught outside of the spotty economic recovery (trumpeted by media+pols as being widespread and holistic) finally paid a dividend.
- belltaco 6y ago
  >Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them They say that, but under Stephen Miller almost every single aspect of legal immigration has been made harder, slower and more expensive than before. After all Steve Bannon said the high number of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley is not compatible with a civic society and that it's worth it for the US to lose economically while restricting legal immigration. So what you encountered was a feature, not a bug.
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    Now, that may be the media soundbite, the actual numbers may surprise you. In 2015, under the obama administration, out of 531k immigrant visas (green cards), only 21k were for employment based categories, with 8600 for investors (visas for sale), and only 11k for EB1,2,3 categories (that is high skilled employees of companies and academics/professors in universities). In 2019, out of 462k green cards, there were 28k employment visas, with 16k for EB1,2,3 categories. So, an asian would have a better opportunity to get a green card and subsequently become CEO under the trump administration. Both republcians and democrats want this feature of preventing high skilled immigration. [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2019AnnualReport/FY19AnnualReport-%20TableI.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual... [2] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2019AnnualReport/FY19AnnualReport-%20TableII.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
    - dalyons 6y ago
      FYI as an immigrant on a visa(so im attuned to this stuff) availability of visas and greencards lowered drastically in 2020. Some of it was purportedly "due to the pandemic" but it was mostly barriers miller/trump wanted to introduce anyway. I would expect the 2020 numbers to be much lower, and if this administration had stayed in power, continued to be much lower into 2021+.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It wasn’t “the administration.” The $1,200 stimulus is structured as a refundable tax credit. The CARES Act itself—which was enacted by a Democratic House and Republican Senate—clearly requires everyone filing a joint return to have a valid SSN. Section 2201(g) says: > (g) IDENTIFICATION NUMBER REQUIREMENT.— ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—No credit shall be allowed under subsection (a) to an eligible individual who does not include on the return of tax for the taxable year— ‘‘(A) such individual’s valid identification number, ‘‘(B) in the case of a joint return, the valid identification number of such individual’s spouse, and ‘‘(C) in the case of any qualifying child taken into account under subsection (a)(2), the valid identification number of such qualifying child. > ‘‘(2) VALID IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.— ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the term ‘valid identification number’ means a social security number (as such term is defined in section 24(h)(7)).
  - waheoo 6y ago
    But.. but.. the narrative..
  - jimz 6y ago
    Ah yes, the clause that neatly manages to exclude tax payers who have ITNs that look and at filing time function just like an SSN but somehow are neatly trimmed out here, I wonder how that got in there...
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      How did it get there?
    - rayiner 6y ago
      It got there because Congress, not the administration, put it in there.
      - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
        It'd be fair to say that vocal hostility toward immigration is more concentrated in one party - and that that party is spread across the WH and Congress. To be reasonable tho, effective hostility toward immigration is historically well represented in both parties (eg: immigration policies under the previous admin).
- crazygringo 6y ago
  It's annoying but can't you file separately instead of jointly for your 2020 return? If I'm interpreting the statute correctly, you'd then receive the stimulus next year. (Since anyone who didn't receive it but is qualified will receive it on their 2020 return, filed in 2021.)
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    Yes, but that’s going to be six-twelve months later than it should have been. And for some people, the penalty for filing separately will outweigh $1200 - such as single income households.
eli 6y ago
I feel like there is a disproportionate focus on relatively small dollar errors and fraud. The point was to get money to people who need it and to keep the economy from collapsing for everyone. Setting up mechanisms to try to catch every mistake would probably have cost more money than it would have saved and definitely would have unnecessarily delayed people getting checks. The stimulus was too small and too slow to begin with.
- acdha 6y ago
  Yes - this was a $2.2 trillion dollar relief bill and the total amount in question is well under $34 million (that number included Americans living abroad). That’s smaller than the amounts individual businesses claimed inappropriately and delaying sending the checks to check all of the recipients would probably have cost more since a lot of that money went straight into the economy paying taxes and keeping people employed.
  - adultSwim 6y ago
    It was actually much larger. 5 trillion was made to only look like 500 billion, using a technical trick. Of the 2.2 trillion, 500 billion was set aside for whatever. This was often reported as the part for big business. Actually it's 500b to seed new special purpose banks that can operate with 10 to 1 leverage. So the 500b is actually 5.5t, making the whole bill several times larger than widely discussed. I'm reminded of the "chain CPI" fiasco where Congress tried to reduce Social Security, but hid it in a technical detail. Except this time Democrats were on board. Neither party challenged the main narrative, and so the media didn't bother to either.
    - nick0garvey 6y ago
      Do you have a source on this 500b allocation? Not finding anything on a quick search.
      - sacomo 6y ago
        Not OP, but found this: https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/4/28/the-cares-act-will-shape-our-economy-for-the-next-decade-or-longer-heres-why-thats-dangerous https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/4/28/the-cares-act-will-... > the CARES Act may end up serving as the second largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy in our lifetimes.
rasengan 6y ago
This is actually ridiculous. Who pays for these mistakes? Who pays for these potential crimes? This structure of governance is failing. In the past, we could do something to the “leaders” of our society — now the leadership is obfuscated.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- czbond 6y ago
  I used to feel the same way (specifically around the Fed and Treasury and national debt) - until I realized, it's just a number on a screen. They print dollars as easily as you and I print from our local printer. The digits are all are meaningless - we're never going to pay back the amounts, or our national debt. We're just going to print and inflate, and pay back any old sums with numbers we just printed.
- eli 6y ago
  Just wait until you find out how much money is lost because an underfunded IRS believes it is unable to effectively audit the wealthy and so mostly doesn't bother.
  - czbond 6y ago
    I would suggest the opposite. IRS realizes the only revenue they're likely to extract correctly are small business owners, and middle to upper class who don't have the time nor legal fee tolerance to fight it. They already extract so little on an |absolute value| basis from the lower 70% of Americans, that it only makes sense to focus on the top x%
    - jellicle 6y ago
      It's great that you have feelings about what the IRS does, but the previous commenter was talking about facts and the IRS's own statements on the issue. The IRS was in the news last year for stating that they have decreased audits on the wealthy because they take too much effort. The most-audited zip codes in the USA are extremely poor areas.
vmchale 6y ago
Sounds on par for this clown car administration.
hsnewman 6y ago
It was obviously Obama's fault. (This is a joke and sarcastic).
ProAm 6y ago
This is nothing compared to how much money the Army loses over seas. Here is a case of 70 billion of literal pallets of cash going 'missing' [q] [y] [z] [q] https://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/u-s-has-lost-sight-of-cash-from-70-billion-sent-to-afghanistan-inspector-general-1.149731 https://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-centra... [y] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pallets-of-cash-to-baghdad-idUSN0631295120070207 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pa... [z] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-missing-iraqi-cash-ended-in-lebanon-bunker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  I never know what I'm supposed to do when I gain this kind of information. Nothing is really going to change in my life time regarding the government of the United States and its inefficient spending, is it? No matter who we vote for or what we believe is right... it's pretty much always going to be the same story with the same problems and overall no change, right? Is it worth reading about/getting worked up over?
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Please read the linked articles again. They do not say that $70B went missing. Afghan & Iraqi national banks had money in US banks. They requested the money so the US banks sent it. The US military delivered it.
fault_lines 6y ago
It’s made clearer in the text, but the conflation of “citizen” and “resident” here is a common irritant that makes it really difficult to understand just what non-citizens are entitled to. The issue here isn’t that they were sent to non-citizens (I am not a citizen and received a stimulus I’m fully entitled to) but that they were sent to non-citizen non-residents. I wouldn’t be surprised if this persistent mistake contributes to animosity towards immigrants.
jdlyga 6y ago
How about sending it to actual Americans. I know few people who actually got checks.
sriram_sun 6y ago
A lot of non-Americans pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems without ever being able to collect from those contributions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mrweasel 6y ago
One Danish newspaper covered this when the checks arrived earlier in the year. The issue they focused on was the fact that the checks are basically worthless. Most Danish banks had no idea how to handle them. Part of the problem is that checks where fased out almost four years ago. To handle the checks the banks would need an American partner bank, but it’s still more trouble that most banks are willing to deal with and they aren’t obligated to cash in checks anymore.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Same situation here in Sweden. Nobody would take it. We set up a Facebook group to find solutions, the easiest one being just getting a US bank account. It's really considered a stone age system here.
- matsemann 6y ago
  Most banks are even wary on having emigrated Americans as customers, as that is also a lot of headaches. (One of few countries where one still in theory have to tax even when no longer living there)
boomboomsubban 6y ago
I don't understand why they're making a news story out of this $34 million dollar error without mentioning that they also sent $1.7 billion to the deceased. Neither seem newsworthy to me, but only detailing the cheapest error is strange.
- disown 6y ago
  Also, why is this story on the frontpage? If it wasn't an NPR story would it gain any traction here? Not only is it not newsworthy, it is uninteresting. It's more spam than news.
- purple-again 6y ago
  Eh this one doesn’t seem that strange to me. People die every day, a lot of them. Sending a check to an American that died and hasn’t been reported upwards to the federal government is not surprising. Sending money to non Americans who are not in America is a bit of a head scratcher. How did that even happen? I don’t care enough about 34 million dollars to look any further into it but I am curious about who these people are and how they got sent checks by the US government. Did they live here once upon a time and left? That would make sense to me, not dissimilar from the dead not dead people, just stale data and speed was the stated goal so stale data is to be expected.
  - ufo 6y ago
    Those noncitizens mentioned in the article all happen to receive social security payments from the US, due to having worked there in the past. > Asked about this by NPR, the IRS acknowledged it mistakenly sent checks to some noncitizens who receive Social Security and other federal benefits — such as Wigforss, who receives a small Social Security payment from having worked in California for several years
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    To be specific, the checks went to legal aliens who are authorized to work in the US, but did not have wages that were withheld in 2018-2019.
crazygringo 6y ago
I can't find any mention in the article that this will obviously be corrected next year. Because the $1,200 checks are just an advance refund on your 2020 tax return (to file in 2021). If you get and cash a stimulus check you don't deserve, you'll need to pay it back on your return next year. Just like if you didn't get a stimulus check you deserved because of IRS mixup (like me), you'll just get it as an additional refund on your return next year. Considering the speed these checks got sent out, there were bound to be errors. It's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem because everything will be properly sorted out on the actual tax returns.
- laken 6y ago
  Some people in the article either have no ties to the US at all or have renounced US citizenship, so it _will not_ be corrected next year as they don't file tax returns. Regardless, this is chump change to the US government, and there are other larger lost amounts of money they should probably worry about anyway.
  - ufo 6y ago
    The two people mentioned in the article still have ties to the US because they receive social security payments.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      The unmentioned reality is that tying these payments to SS payouts helped millions of people - the ones who are least able to navigate complex government systems.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    If you owe money to the IRS, you need to file a tax return whether you're a US citizen or not. Now you might say, well what is the US gonna do if you don't? Well, the people mentioned in the article receive Social Security (so "no ties to the US at all" is false), and you can 100% expect their SS checks to be garnished to cover debt to the IRS, as this happens all the time with unpaid back taxes. So it's not going to be any free money at the end of the day. The whole process would obviously take a few years, but literally all the systems are already in place for it. Nothing special even needs to be done. It'll just happen.
at_a_remove 6y ago
Meanwhile, my tax return has yet to arrive. I was pretty patient because I knew this year would be a complete shit-show for the IRS (as it has been for everyone else), but now I am starting to wonder.
- delecti 6y ago
  Minor nit, but the return is what you file, the refund is what you're waiting for. And they're super far behind in processing mail-in returns. Apparently they still had millions of unprocessed returns remaining as late as October, so it's likely they still haven't processed your return, but you can check the status of it here. https://www.irs.gov/refunds https://www.irs.gov/refunds
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Oh yeah, I have been checking that page once a week for a month now. No dice. I hate to call and bother them, because that just means extra work for them when they're already backed up, but at the same time, I do not want to find out that my filing has been lost in the mail.
tabob 6y ago
This is a kick in the gut. I’ve been unemployed 9 monthsc and was denied unemployment. I also made too much for the stimulus.. but hey let’s give my tax dollars to foreigners, because fuck me right?
- 248979213 6y ago
  The US government regularly do much worse things with tax money then send it to random foreigners. I would much rather the money be sent to random foreigners then used to bomb random foreigners for example.
  - tabob 6y ago
    That money will go towards destroying the rest of the world no matter what. That's what Americans do, we kill muslims in the name of Jesus. That's all we know how to do anymore. I can't stop that. However, I paid $60k in taxes last year, and I basically will not be able to find work this year thanks to covid. I'm struggling, and NONE of that money I've given is coming back to me. I've been paying taxes on income since I was 15, 26 years, and my government basically told me to go fuck myself. I've also generated many millions of dollars for YC startups, helped them get funding, helped them get employees. Now that I can't find work, everyone who used to call me up constantly asking me for help has fucked off. BTW, Alex from Pagerduty, I hope you get covid and die you greedy piece of trash! You should have been kicked off the internet for ignoring someone trying to rape one of your employees.
    - dang 6y ago
      That sucks and I hope your situation improves greatly very soon. Separately, could you please follow the site guidelines when posting here? I know that many people are under pressure but we have to try to keep this place from destroying itself. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
positivejam 6y ago
Please correct my math if I got this wrong, but a less click-baity headline would be: > IRS Says Its Own Error Sent 0.0016 Percent of a $2.2 Trillion Stimulus Package to Non-Americans Overseas 34 million / 2.2 trillion = 0.00005454...
nikiu 6y ago
Yep, a friend of mine who had been once in the States, as a seasonal worker, got the check.
joecool1029 6y ago
Might as well tell my story. The way it's gone for me is last year converted my company from S-corp to sole proprietorship. This was done because my state (NJ) was paying out unemployment claims to people I have never met (in NY) and providing me with no way to contest this other than to retain an attorney and file in superior court. The conversion had some minor tax implications but otherwise would allow me to draw instead of pay myself a salary subject to unemployment taxes. For 3 months this year I was out of operation due to COVID, during which time CARES Act was supposed to pay unemployment + $600/wk to sole proprietors. Stuck pending since April, expect to never see it. I have sent letters, faxes, spoken to court clerks, assemblymen, reported to unemployment's investigators regarding the false claims I had for a few years before COVID hit, and I was never able to get a resolution. Regarding the IRS end, no check here. The CARES act wasn't written for people who didn't file in 2018 but were required to file in 2019. It explicitly said to not use the non-filer option if a 2019 return was required. I'm still trying to get my ID verified with the IRS (I haven't moved, they accepted 2 corporate returns last year with my name on them, and I've never hit this requirement before). I do not expect to see a check from them either. Nobody there to answer the phone for weeks now. I did, however, receive one soft notice from the IRS notifying me that I should review and re-submit a return from (I think?) 2012 or 2013 for unreported bitcoin transactions. Yeah... I'll get right on that.
- tabob 6y ago
  You should know that a company called Phunware, which built Trump's campaign app, received 3x as much CARES stimulus per capita than anybody was supposed to get. If you voted Republican and donated to the GOP you are way more likely to get CARES checks. They're a horoscope company which ripped off "investors" for $40m in a scam ICO 3 years ago, and they donated heavily to Trump.
0xWTF 6y ago
The cynical side of me says this is an expectable result of a large open system so likely a submarine story placed by Republican operatives who are trying to prevent additional stimulus spending. Or maybe the service that handles trillions of dollars is in fact completely incompetent and shouldn't be trusted with revenue routing.
thoughtstheseus 6y ago
This is why we should have a simple government run narrow bank. Direct cash payments would be much less of a problem, you could implement a preferred return for savers(dual interest rates), and it would scale across multiple government programs.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
This was months ago. It was a miniscule amount of the govermment budget. I can't believe people are still talking about it like it matters.
hysan 6y ago
Sigh... my wife and I haven’t gotten this stimulus check yet. Every month, the IRS website has no update on our status. We filed our taxes early and even got our tax refunds before the normal April 15th deadline. They clearly have our information and our accountant confirmed that we 100% qualify. It’s very frustrating to hear this when we (and many others) haven’t received anything. Especially since that extra money could have helped relieve a lot of stress when I was job hunting because of COVID layoffs.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Shut down the IRS

223 points by brundolf 6y ago

Meanwhile, actual US citizens who were married to somebody with an ITIN (for example, my wife is in the process of getting her immigrant visa and green card), got $0 stimulus money whatsoever. Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them?

whimsicalism 6y ago
Yes, it also penalized attending college.
Natsu 6y ago
It seemed to work for those with a green card, at least, though I was sort of worried that it would be counted as 'public assistance' for the purposes of the 'public charge' rule that's now being enforced. Seems that it's not being considered as such, though, at least according to the lawyer I talked to.
- kylehotchkiss 6y ago
  So long as you got your SSN (which I hear are printed much faster than green cards) you should have gotten it. Thankfully public charge rule is on the way out, and I wish you a smooth journey to citizenship without that policy looming much longer :D
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  Nah, the public charge rule refers to a specific set of federal benefits. This legislatively created extra tax refund is not one of those.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    I figured that it would make no sense to count it as such, but I also thought it made no sense to require every field on each immigration form to be filled out. With PDF form validation being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised to see people listed as having 5 kids named NA NA NA in USCIS records in the future.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Claim it on your taxes... the $1200 was just basically a tax credit given ahead of time. If you qualify, you can claim it in January... won't help you today :(
- pc86 6y ago
  But they don't qualify, that's the point. If you have an ITIN you don't qualify for this kind of tax credit.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  The rules are even weirder than that. The advance tax credit doesn't have to be repaid even if 2020 income makes one qualify for a smaller amount than actually received or for no payment at all. But if 2020 income is low enough to qualify for a higher payment, you do get to claim the difference on the 2020 tax return. Even weirder, if your payment would be different between 2018 and 2019 income, the actual payment the law granted earlier this year depended on which returns had been filed at the time the IRS determined eligibility, with no adjustment for subsequent filings. I qualified for my full payment based on my 2018 income, would not have qualified for anything based on my 2019 income, and did not expect to qualify for 2020 either (although the impact of the pandemic means I actually would). I made sure not to file my 2019 tax return until after I got my payment. Very badly designed legislation, though there may not have been much alternative if they wanted to act quickly.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    Well huzzah for year over year poverty. Being caught outside of the spotty economic recovery (trumpeted by media+pols as being widespread and holistic) finally paid a dividend.
belltaco 6y ago
>Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them They say that, but under Stephen Miller almost every single aspect of legal immigration has been made harder, slower and more expensive than before. After all Steve Bannon said the high number of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley is not compatible with a civic society and that it's worth it for the US to lose economically while restricting legal immigration. So what you encountered was a feature, not a bug.
- legolas2412 6y ago
  Now, that may be the media soundbite, the actual numbers may surprise you. In 2015, under the obama administration, out of 531k immigrant visas (green cards), only 21k were for employment based categories, with 8600 for investors (visas for sale), and only 11k for EB1,2,3 categories (that is high skilled employees of companies and academics/professors in universities). In 2019, out of 462k green cards, there were 28k employment visas, with 16k for EB1,2,3 categories. So, an asian would have a better opportunity to get a green card and subsequently become CEO under the trump administration. Both republcians and democrats want this feature of preventing high skilled immigration. [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2019AnnualReport/FY19AnnualReport-%20TableI.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual... [2] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2019AnnualReport/FY19AnnualReport-%20TableII.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
  - dalyons 6y ago
    FYI as an immigrant on a visa(so im attuned to this stuff) availability of visas and greencards lowered drastically in 2020. Some of it was purportedly "due to the pandemic" but it was mostly barriers miller/trump wanted to introduce anyway. I would expect the 2020 numbers to be much lower, and if this administration had stayed in power, continued to be much lower into 2021+.
rayiner 6y ago
It wasn’t “the administration.” The $1,200 stimulus is structured as a refundable tax credit. The CARES Act itself—which was enacted by a Democratic House and Republican Senate—clearly requires everyone filing a joint return to have a valid SSN. Section 2201(g) says: > (g) IDENTIFICATION NUMBER REQUIREMENT.— ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—No credit shall be allowed under subsection (a) to an eligible individual who does not include on the return of tax for the taxable year— ‘‘(A) such individual’s valid identification number, ‘‘(B) in the case of a joint return, the valid identification number of such individual’s spouse, and ‘‘(C) in the case of any qualifying child taken into account under subsection (a)(2), the valid identification number of such qualifying child. > ‘‘(2) VALID IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.— ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the term ‘valid identification number’ means a social security number (as such term is defined in section 24(h)(7)).
- waheoo 6y ago
  But.. but.. the narrative..
- jimz 6y ago
  Ah yes, the clause that neatly manages to exclude tax payers who have ITNs that look and at filing time function just like an SSN but somehow are neatly trimmed out here, I wonder how that got in there...
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    How did it get there?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    It got there because Congress, not the administration, put it in there.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      It'd be fair to say that vocal hostility toward immigration is more concentrated in one party - and that that party is spread across the WH and Congress. To be reasonable tho, effective hostility toward immigration is historically well represented in both parties (eg: immigration policies under the previous admin).
crazygringo 6y ago
It's annoying but can't you file separately instead of jointly for your 2020 return? If I'm interpreting the statute correctly, you'd then receive the stimulus next year. (Since anyone who didn't receive it but is qualified will receive it on their 2020 return, filed in 2021.)
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  Yes, but that’s going to be six-twelve months later than it should have been. And for some people, the penalty for filing separately will outweigh $1200 - such as single income households.

eli 6y ago

I feel like there is a disproportionate focus on relatively small dollar errors and fraud. The point was to get money to people who need it and to keep the economy from collapsing for everyone. Setting up mechanisms to try to catch every mistake would probably have cost more money than it would have saved and definitely would have unnecessarily delayed people getting checks. The stimulus was too small and too slow to begin with.

acdha 6y ago
Yes - this was a $2.2 trillion dollar relief bill and the total amount in question is well under $34 million (that number included Americans living abroad). That’s smaller than the amounts individual businesses claimed inappropriately and delaying sending the checks to check all of the recipients would probably have cost more since a lot of that money went straight into the economy paying taxes and keeping people employed.
- adultSwim 6y ago
  It was actually much larger. 5 trillion was made to only look like 500 billion, using a technical trick. Of the 2.2 trillion, 500 billion was set aside for whatever. This was often reported as the part for big business. Actually it's 500b to seed new special purpose banks that can operate with 10 to 1 leverage. So the 500b is actually 5.5t, making the whole bill several times larger than widely discussed. I'm reminded of the "chain CPI" fiasco where Congress tried to reduce Social Security, but hid it in a technical detail. Except this time Democrats were on board. Neither party challenged the main narrative, and so the media didn't bother to either.
  - nick0garvey 6y ago
    Do you have a source on this 500b allocation? Not finding anything on a quick search.
    - sacomo 6y ago
      Not OP, but found this: https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/4/28/the-cares-act-will-shape-our-economy-for-the-next-decade-or-longer-heres-why-thats-dangerous https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/4/28/the-cares-act-will-... > the CARES Act may end up serving as the second largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy in our lifetimes.

rasengan 6y ago

This is actually ridiculous. Who pays for these mistakes? Who pays for these potential crimes? This structure of governance is failing. In the past, we could do something to the “leaders” of our society — now the leadership is obfuscated.

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czbond 6y ago
I used to feel the same way (specifically around the Fed and Treasury and national debt) - until I realized, it's just a number on a screen. They print dollars as easily as you and I print from our local printer. The digits are all are meaningless - we're never going to pay back the amounts, or our national debt. We're just going to print and inflate, and pay back any old sums with numbers we just printed.
eli 6y ago
Just wait until you find out how much money is lost because an underfunded IRS believes it is unable to effectively audit the wealthy and so mostly doesn't bother.
- czbond 6y ago
  I would suggest the opposite. IRS realizes the only revenue they're likely to extract correctly are small business owners, and middle to upper class who don't have the time nor legal fee tolerance to fight it. They already extract so little on an |absolute value| basis from the lower 70% of Americans, that it only makes sense to focus on the top x%
  - jellicle 6y ago
    It's great that you have feelings about what the IRS does, but the previous commenter was talking about facts and the IRS's own statements on the issue. The IRS was in the news last year for stating that they have decreased audits on the wealthy because they take too much effort. The most-audited zip codes in the USA are extremely poor areas.

vmchale 6y ago

Sounds on par for this clown car administration.

hsnewman 6y ago

It was obviously Obama's fault. (This is a joke and sarcastic).

ProAm 6y ago

This is nothing compared to how much money the Army loses over seas. Here is a case of 70 billion of literal pallets of cash going 'missing' [q] [y] [z] [q] https://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/u-s-has-lost-sight-of-cash-from-70-billion-sent-to-afghanistan-inspector-general-1.149731 https://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-centra... [y] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pallets-of-cash-to-baghdad-idUSN0631295120070207 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pa... [z] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-missing-iraqi-cash-ended-in-lebanon-bunker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-...

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MuffinFlavored 6y ago
I never know what I'm supposed to do when I gain this kind of information. Nothing is really going to change in my life time regarding the government of the United States and its inefficient spending, is it? No matter who we vote for or what we believe is right... it's pretty much always going to be the same story with the same problems and overall no change, right? Is it worth reading about/getting worked up over?
mleonhard 6y ago
Please read the linked articles again. They do not say that $70B went missing. Afghan & Iraqi national banks had money in US banks. They requested the money so the US banks sent it. The US military delivered it.

fault_lines 6y ago

It’s made clearer in the text, but the conflation of “citizen” and “resident” here is a common irritant that makes it really difficult to understand just what non-citizens are entitled to. The issue here isn’t that they were sent to non-citizens (I am not a citizen and received a stimulus I’m fully entitled to) but that they were sent to non-citizen non-residents. I wouldn’t be surprised if this persistent mistake contributes to animosity towards immigrants.

jdlyga 6y ago

How about sending it to actual Americans. I know few people who actually got checks.

sriram_sun 6y ago

A lot of non-Americans pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems without ever being able to collect from those contributions.

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mrweasel 6y ago

One Danish newspaper covered this when the checks arrived earlier in the year. The issue they focused on was the fact that the checks are basically worthless. Most Danish banks had no idea how to handle them. Part of the problem is that checks where fased out almost four years ago. To handle the checks the banks would need an American partner bank, but it’s still more trouble that most banks are willing to deal with and they aren’t obligated to cash in checks anymore.

guerrilla 6y ago
Same situation here in Sweden. Nobody would take it. We set up a Facebook group to find solutions, the easiest one being just getting a US bank account. It's really considered a stone age system here.
matsemann 6y ago
Most banks are even wary on having emigrated Americans as customers, as that is also a lot of headaches. (One of few countries where one still in theory have to tax even when no longer living there)

boomboomsubban 6y ago

I don't understand why they're making a news story out of this $34 million dollar error without mentioning that they also sent $1.7 billion to the deceased. Neither seem newsworthy to me, but only detailing the cheapest error is strange.

disown 6y ago
Also, why is this story on the frontpage? If it wasn't an NPR story would it gain any traction here? Not only is it not newsworthy, it is uninteresting. It's more spam than news.
purple-again 6y ago
Eh this one doesn’t seem that strange to me. People die every day, a lot of them. Sending a check to an American that died and hasn’t been reported upwards to the federal government is not surprising. Sending money to non Americans who are not in America is a bit of a head scratcher. How did that even happen? I don’t care enough about 34 million dollars to look any further into it but I am curious about who these people are and how they got sent checks by the US government. Did they live here once upon a time and left? That would make sense to me, not dissimilar from the dead not dead people, just stale data and speed was the stated goal so stale data is to be expected.
- ufo 6y ago
  Those noncitizens mentioned in the article all happen to receive social security payments from the US, due to having worked there in the past. > Asked about this by NPR, the IRS acknowledged it mistakenly sent checks to some noncitizens who receive Social Security and other federal benefits — such as Wigforss, who receives a small Social Security payment from having worked in California for several years
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  To be specific, the checks went to legal aliens who are authorized to work in the US, but did not have wages that were withheld in 2018-2019.

crazygringo 6y ago

I can't find any mention in the article that this will obviously be corrected next year. Because the $1,200 checks are just an advance refund on your 2020 tax return (to file in 2021). If you get and cash a stimulus check you don't deserve, you'll need to pay it back on your return next year. Just like if you didn't get a stimulus check you deserved because of IRS mixup (like me), you'll just get it as an additional refund on your return next year. Considering the speed these checks got sent out, there were bound to be errors. It's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem because everything will be properly sorted out on the actual tax returns.

laken 6y ago
Some people in the article either have no ties to the US at all or have renounced US citizenship, so it _will not_ be corrected next year as they don't file tax returns. Regardless, this is chump change to the US government, and there are other larger lost amounts of money they should probably worry about anyway.
- ufo 6y ago
  The two people mentioned in the article still have ties to the US because they receive social security payments.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    The unmentioned reality is that tying these payments to SS payouts helped millions of people - the ones who are least able to navigate complex government systems.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  If you owe money to the IRS, you need to file a tax return whether you're a US citizen or not. Now you might say, well what is the US gonna do if you don't? Well, the people mentioned in the article receive Social Security (so "no ties to the US at all" is false), and you can 100% expect their SS checks to be garnished to cover debt to the IRS, as this happens all the time with unpaid back taxes. So it's not going to be any free money at the end of the day. The whole process would obviously take a few years, but literally all the systems are already in place for it. Nothing special even needs to be done. It'll just happen.

at_a_remove 6y ago

Meanwhile, my tax return has yet to arrive. I was pretty patient because I knew this year would be a complete shit-show for the IRS (as it has been for everyone else), but now I am starting to wonder.

delecti 6y ago
Minor nit, but the return is what you file, the refund is what you're waiting for. And they're super far behind in processing mail-in returns. Apparently they still had millions of unprocessed returns remaining as late as October, so it's likely they still haven't processed your return, but you can check the status of it here. https://www.irs.gov/refunds https://www.irs.gov/refunds
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Oh yeah, I have been checking that page once a week for a month now. No dice. I hate to call and bother them, because that just means extra work for them when they're already backed up, but at the same time, I do not want to find out that my filing has been lost in the mail.

tabob 6y ago

This is a kick in the gut. I’ve been unemployed 9 monthsc and was denied unemployment. I also made too much for the stimulus.. but hey let’s give my tax dollars to foreigners, because fuck me right?

248979213 6y ago
The US government regularly do much worse things with tax money then send it to random foreigners. I would much rather the money be sent to random foreigners then used to bomb random foreigners for example.
- tabob 6y ago
  That money will go towards destroying the rest of the world no matter what. That's what Americans do, we kill muslims in the name of Jesus. That's all we know how to do anymore. I can't stop that. However, I paid $60k in taxes last year, and I basically will not be able to find work this year thanks to covid. I'm struggling, and NONE of that money I've given is coming back to me. I've been paying taxes on income since I was 15, 26 years, and my government basically told me to go fuck myself. I've also generated many millions of dollars for YC startups, helped them get funding, helped them get employees. Now that I can't find work, everyone who used to call me up constantly asking me for help has fucked off. BTW, Alex from Pagerduty, I hope you get covid and die you greedy piece of trash! You should have been kicked off the internet for ignoring someone trying to rape one of your employees.
  - dang 6y ago
    That sucks and I hope your situation improves greatly very soon. Separately, could you please follow the site guidelines when posting here? I know that many people are under pressure but we have to try to keep this place from destroying itself. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

positivejam 6y ago

Please correct my math if I got this wrong, but a less click-baity headline would be: > IRS Says Its Own Error Sent 0.0016 Percent of a $2.2 Trillion Stimulus Package to Non-Americans Overseas 34 million / 2.2 trillion = 0.00005454...

nikiu 6y ago

Yep, a friend of mine who had been once in the States, as a seasonal worker, got the check.

joecool1029 6y ago

Might as well tell my story. The way it's gone for me is last year converted my company from S-corp to sole proprietorship. This was done because my state (NJ) was paying out unemployment claims to people I have never met (in NY) and providing me with no way to contest this other than to retain an attorney and file in superior court. The conversion had some minor tax implications but otherwise would allow me to draw instead of pay myself a salary subject to unemployment taxes. For 3 months this year I was out of operation due to COVID, during which time CARES Act was supposed to pay unemployment + $600/wk to sole proprietors. Stuck pending since April, expect to never see it. I have sent letters, faxes, spoken to court clerks, assemblymen, reported to unemployment's investigators regarding the false claims I had for a few years before COVID hit, and I was never able to get a resolution. Regarding the IRS end, no check here. The CARES act wasn't written for people who didn't file in 2018 but were required to file in 2019. It explicitly said to not use the non-filer option if a 2019 return was required. I'm still trying to get my ID verified with the IRS (I haven't moved, they accepted 2 corporate returns last year with my name on them, and I've never hit this requirement before). I do not expect to see a check from them either. Nobody there to answer the phone for weeks now. I did, however, receive one soft notice from the IRS notifying me that I should review and re-submit a return from (I think?) 2012 or 2013 for unreported bitcoin transactions. Yeah... I'll get right on that.

tabob 6y ago
You should know that a company called Phunware, which built Trump's campaign app, received 3x as much CARES stimulus per capita than anybody was supposed to get. If you voted Republican and donated to the GOP you are way more likely to get CARES checks. They're a horoscope company which ripped off "investors" for $40m in a scam ICO 3 years ago, and they donated heavily to Trump.

0xWTF 6y ago

The cynical side of me says this is an expectable result of a large open system so likely a submarine story placed by Republican operatives who are trying to prevent additional stimulus spending. Or maybe the service that handles trillions of dollars is in fact completely incompetent and shouldn't be trusted with revenue routing.

thoughtstheseus 6y ago

This is why we should have a simple government run narrow bank. Direct cash payments would be much less of a problem, you could implement a preferred return for savers(dual interest rates), and it would scale across multiple government programs.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

This was months ago. It was a miniscule amount of the govermment budget. I can't believe people are still talking about it like it matters.

hysan 6y ago

Sigh... my wife and I haven’t gotten this stimulus check yet. Every month, the IRS website has no update on our status. We filed our taxes early and even got our tax refunds before the normal April 15th deadline. They clearly have our information and our accountant confirmed that we 100% qualify. It’s very frustrating to hear this when we (and many others) haven’t received anything. Especially since that extra money could have helped relieve a lot of stress when I was job hunting because of COVID layoffs.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Shut down the IRS