The federal government sent coronavirus stimulus payments to almost 1.1 million dead people, totaling nearly $1.4 billion, Congress’s independent watchdog reported Thursday…
—from the Washington Post, June 26, 2020
We’d heard something about this, a few weeks earlier. Rumor was, the Treasury Department, in collaboration with the Internal Revenue Service, had mailed out a bunch of $1,200 CARES Act stimulus checks to people who might be unable to make efficient use of the money.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent investigative agency that reports to Congress, discovered the problem and issued some suggestions. Among their recommendations was that the IRS “should consider cost-effective options for notifying ineligible recipients how to return payments.”
I’m trying to wrap my head around this. As I understand the problem, slightly more than one million Americans have received a $1,200 payment from the US Treasury, but are presumably unable to cash the checks because they are dead.
If I am dead, what kind of “cost-effective options” can the IRS provide for me, so that I can conveniently return the payment?
The folks at the IRS are no dummies, but that seems like a really challenging mission — to figure out a way to get dead recipients to return their stimulus checks. If I know anything at all about Americans, we like to hang on to money sent to us by the government, whether we deserved it or not.
And maybe that what bothers me most about this whole issue. The Treasury and the IRS are acting like these recipients don’t deserve a stimulus check, simply because they’re no longer alive.
Fortunately, we have an administration in Washington DC that is working hard to eliminate COVID testing. And that makes so much sense, because the more tests we do, the more people will show up in the data as infected individuals, and could potentially wind up as dead stimulus check recipients, thus causing even more headaches for the IRS.
Meanwhile, arrogant state governments continue to try and test as many symptomatic people as possible, thus driving up the case numbers unnecessarily. Easy for them, of course, because they don’t have to try and get any checks returned.
My dad — may he rest in peace — used to tell us kids, “You can’t take it with you.” Now I’m wondering if he was wrong.
Of course, we are also left wondering: if a dead person refuses to return their check — what would they spend it on? Funeral expenses?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.