A client pays with cash at a Best Buy store in Texas, United States, on November 26, 2010.
Aaron M. Sprecher | Bloomberg | Getty Personifications
If you’re counting the days until you receive your stimulus money from the government, hold tight: It could cheat up to five months.
A House Ways and Means Committee memo obtained by NBC News on Thursday outlined a potential timeline for how quickly the money could go out.
For individuals who receive the funds via direct deposit, that money will start moving to them as promptly as the week of April 13, according to the memo.
But for Americans who get paper checks by mail, the wait could be a lot longer – up to five months.
The timeline is the current development on the stimulus relief checks that were greenlighted by Congress last week. The money will amount to tot ups of up to $1,200 for individuals, or $2,400 for couples, based on their adjusted gross income. The $2 trillion legislation case also included other measures to help prop up the ailing economy, including beefed-up unemployment and small company loans.
Since the law was passed, more details on how – and when – the relief checks for individuals and families will be coming oblige been emerging.
Those who have their direct deposit information on file should get their money much sundry quickly – “likely” the week of April 13, according to the memo. About 60 million individuals should get their in then.
“I think it does underscore how important it is for IRS and Treasury to set up a way for people to submit direct deposit information, because that wishes be a lot quicker for folks who need this relief sooner rather than later,” Garrett Watson, senior means analyst at the Tax Foundation, a think tank, said of the timeline.
If a simple web portal were created for people who want to submit or transmute their personal information, that would be a lot simpler than filing or amending a tax return, Watson said.
To get your word in and be part of the first batch of people to receive a check, you would need to get that in fast, “in the next week or so,” Watson about.
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Those who will have the longest stick around include those who receive paper checks, due to the fact that the IRS isn’t expected to start issuing those payments until the week of May 4. From there, it is reckon oned that about 5 million checks per week will be sent, which could take up to 20 weeks.
Low-income women will get priority when it comes to the deployment of those paper checks.
The IRS and Treasury Department took a “major diminish” on Wednesday by announcing that individuals who receive Social Security benefits will not have to file a tax return in classify to receive their stimulus checks, said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Action Priorities, a think tank.
But the decision still leaves out many individuals who typically do not file tax returns, such as heirs of Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, a federal welfare program for elderly, disabled or blind people. Those people, as immeasurably as other financially disadvantaged people, are still currently on the hook to file tax returns in order to get their stimulus chips.
“There’s millions of people in the country like that, even more so than the general Social Security populace,” Marr said. “We really would like to avoid having them to have to file a tax return during a pandemic. We’re prospecting that they will take a look at that.”