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.
Ravi Govindaraju is head of Connected Banking at Chase.
Craig Kurtzweil is the chief data and analytics officer at UnitedHealthcare Employer & Individual. In this role, he is responsible for leveraging healthcare's largest data set to help enable informed health care decisions, ensuring consistency across internal and external reporting, exploring new ways to apply data through machine learning and artificial intelligence, and making data a competitive differentiator for UnitedHealthcare in the marketplace. He is known for his leadership in delivering compelling insight based on data and analytics in a narrative that supports the vision of helping people live healthier lives and making the health care system work better for everyone.
Craig joined the organization in 2005 to begin building a team of strategic customer analytics specialists. Since then, he has been focusing on enhancing the role that analytics plays in the ability to support National Accounts customers. Craig formed the Center for Advanced Analytics to focus on analytic innovations that change the way we evaluate health care value. His teams also focus on the largest and most complex clients that require a deeper and broader view of data, ranging from cost and utilization data to productivity and disability exposure. He is constantly working on the next generation of health care analytics.
Prior to joining UnitedHealthcare, Craig served as an actuarial consultant at Deloitte. Craig graduated University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science in actuarial science. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, son and daughter.
Patty Starr is president and CEO of Health Action Council and is responsible for driving the strategic direction of the organization--build stronger, healthier communities where business can thrive. Since joining the Health Action Council staff in 2013, she has transformed the organization yielding broad national expansion and seven consecutive years of growth.
Patty is a member of the Advisory Board at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and the Board of Directors for Health Policy Institute of Ohio (HPIO). She has also served on the Board of Directors for the Better Health Partnership, Ohio Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative and Health Action Council before becoming executive director in 2013. In 2022, she was named a Woman of Influence by Cleveland Business Journal, and in 2018, she was named among Notable Women in Healthcare by Crain's Cleveland Business.
Prior to Health Action Council, she was the senior director of health insurance and benefits at the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) and president and founder of The Ark Individual Insurance Brokerage.
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.
