Patricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, the IRSs parent agency, said in an email that the overwhelming majority of eligible Americans will receive stimulus payments within the next three weeks. She said that Treasury expects 50 million to 70 million Americans to receive checks through direct deposit by April 15, offering a slightly different assessment than the IRS draft plan.
Taxpayers who havent provided direct deposit information on their 2018 or 2019 tax returns will be able to enter it in a portal the IRS is setting up to speed up receipt of their checks, McLaughlin said.
The IRS plan would distribute paper checks to the lowest-income Americans first, prioritizing payments for individual taxpayers with incomes of $10,000 or less on April 24.
Checks for earners of $20,000 or less would be in the mail May 1, followed by those with incomes of $30,000 on May 8, $40,000 on May 15, and continuing in income increments of $10,000 each week, according to the plan. The IRS plans to issue about 5 million checks each week.
Stimulus checks would be issued on Sept. 4 to joint taxpayers earning $198,000, the maximum allowed under the stimulus. All others would be sent on Sept. 11, in most cases because the IRS did not have prior tax information for them and they need to apply for the checks.
The tax agency is racing to set up payment systems as millions of Americans have been forced out of the labor force by the pandemic, with jobless claims soaring to a staggering 6.6 million last week.
The plan is to generate electronic checks on April 9, according to the payment schedule reviewed by The Washington Post. Depending on how quickly banks process the payments, they would be deposited by April 14 at the latest.