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COVID-19

Still waiting for your stimulus money? The deadline for direct deposit information is Wednesday.

Meghan McCarty Carino May 12, 2020
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Some paper checks have already gone out, the IRS says, but others could take until June or July. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
COVID-19

Still waiting for your stimulus money? The deadline for direct deposit information is Wednesday.

Meghan McCarty Carino May 12, 2020
Heard on:
Some paper checks have already gone out, the IRS says, but others could take until June or July. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET is the deadline for taxpayers to provide their banking information to the IRS if they want to get their stimulus payments by direct deposit instead of a paper check.

The IRS has already disbursed 130 million payments totaling about $200 billion to taxpayers as of last week, which leaves about 20 million Americans still waiting.

Beverly Steward says it seems like everyone she knows has already seen that stimulus money hit their bank accounts. But when she logs on to the IRS portal to check on hers, “it says we have no information at this time.”

Steward, a therapy coordinator in Germantown, Maryland, has lost income due to the pandemic. She had enough savings to pay her bills this month, “but when June comes, if that stimulus does not come, I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” she said.

Steward just recently filed her taxes for the last couple years. So to be sure the IRS knows where to find her, she submitted her direct deposit information a couple different ways.

There are lots of reasons the IRS might not have a taxpayer’s bank data says Greg Geisler, a clinical professor of accounting at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. But the biggest reason?

“If they owed instead of getting a refund, the IRS does not have their bank account information,” Geisler said.

That’s the case for about 40 million Americans. Others might not have filed taxes at all, while some opt to get their tax refunds by mail.

The IRS says some stimulus checks have already gone out by snail mail, but others could take until June or July to arrive.

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