The Internal Revenue Service is bringing in 3,500 telephone operators to deal with the flood of calls about economic impact payments from taxpayers waiting for their money from the IRS.
The $2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March included provisions to give individual taxpayers $1,200 each, $2,400 for couples, plus an extra $500 for each of their dependent children to help them get through the economic fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic. While 140 million of the 150 million payments have been sent oiut, according to figures from the IRS on Monday, numerous problems quickly emerged.
Professor Judge Mervyn King is a Senior Counsel and former Judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He is Professor Extraordinaire at the University of South Africa on Corporate Citizenship, Honorary Professor at the University of Pretoria and Visiting Professor at Rhodes UniversityHe has an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of the Witwatersrand, is Chairman of the King Committee on Corporate Governance in South Africa, which produced King I, II and III, and is First Vice President of the Institute of Directors Southern Africa. He is Chairman of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), Chairman Emeritus of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a member of the Private Sector Advisory Group to the World Bank on Corporate Governance. He chaired the United Nations Committee on Governance and Oversight and was President of the Advertising Standards Authority for 15 years. He has been a chairman, director and chief executive of several companies listed on the London, Luxembourg and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges. He has consulted, advised and spoken on legal, business, advertising, sustainability and corporate governance issues in 53 countries and has received many awards. He is the author of two books on governance and sustainability and sits as an arbitrator and mediator internationally. His new book, co-authored with Linda de Beer, is The Auditor: Quo Vadis?
Chris Collins is a serial entrepreneur who has founded several technology start-ups in the HR tech and gaming spaces. Currently, he’s CEO of RoboRecruiter, one of the largest chatbot platforms with proven conversational technologies across hundreds built for people who hire professionally, by a team of staffing professionals who have achieved recruitment success. For more information about Chris Collins, follow him on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinschris.
Pam White currently works for Cherry Bekaert LLP at its headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. Joining Cherry Bekaert in 2000, Pam started as an internal staff accountant. A controller since 2016, she is part of the finance & accounting department and oversees the accounts payable, payroll, and internal and subsidiary accounting for the firm. White graduated from Longwood College (now named Longwood University) in 1993 with a bachelor of science degree in business administration, with a concentration in accounting
The IRS relied on direct deposit information from taxpayers’ 2018 and 2019 tax returns, when it was available. But many bank accounts were temporary ones set up by tax prep chains for doing refund transfers, and there was no record of the taxpayer’s own bank account. Taxpayers were asked to enter their own direct deposit information online in such cases, and many are still awaiting their checks. The paper checks only recently started being sent out, and in some cases the IRS didn’t have the most up-to-date addresses for taxpayers. In some cases, payments were mistakenly sent to deceased taxpayers and people living abroad.
Much of the IRS workforce has been working remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, although some have been called back to work to deal with the voluminous unopened paper correspondence that has piled up in trailers outside the IRS offices. Now it is starting to bring back employees to answer the phones and answer questions from anxious taxpayers about the status of their payments, although presumably these employees could work remotely.
The IRS warned Monday that telephone assistance and other services will nevertheless remain limited. The agency expects to bring back additional telephone helpers as state and local advisories allow.
In any case, answers for most of the common questions related to the economic impact payments can be found online on IRS.gov. The IRS regularly posts new and updated responses to the most frequently asked questions about economic impact payments here and in the FAQ page for its Get My Payment tool. Taxpayers who want to know about the status of their economic impact payment can check the Get My Payment page regularly. The information is updated as the IRS continues to process the rest of the payments for delivery.
Answers for most questions about the stimulus payments are also available on the automated message for people who call the phone number provided in the letter they receive about their economic impact payments, known as Notice 1444, a letter signed by President Trump informing them their payment has arrived (whether it has or not). Those who need more assistance at the end of the message will have the option of talking to a live representative.
