IRS sent more than $1 billion in payments to ineligible families: audit

The Internal Revenue Service mistakenly sent more than $1 billion in child tax credit payments last year to millions of Americans who weren’t eligible for the free money, revealed Tuesday. an audit.

The audit also revealed that 3.3 million payments should not have been sent between July and November of last year, but the IRS also failed to send payments worth 3 $.7 billion to more than 4 million eligible taxpayers.

Payments wrongly made went to 1.5 million ineligible taxpayers in cases where “a dependent did not meet the age requirements, was deceased or was claimed on another tax return,” the report said. the Inspector General of the Treasury for tax administration.

People who received the payments who weren’t supposed to have likely been forced to shell out the money on their 2021 tax returns filed this year, while people who should have received the money and didn’t did not could claim the full amount on their tax returns, according to the audit.

The tax office informed the IRS if it was sending payments to the wrong people in real time while the tax credit was available for certain American households from July to December 2021.

The US bailout, passed last March, temporarily expanded the tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for a child under 18 and up to $3,600 for children under 6 .

The findings come as the IRS seeks to crack down on average taxpayers to help fund Biden’s Cut Inflation Act. The IRA legislation that was signed into law by President Biden will force working-class Americans to pay billions of dollars in new taxes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last month.

Yet the report notes that 98% of all payments – or 175.6 million – which amounted to $75.6 billion went to the correct recipients.

The agency, in its response to the audit, boasted that most taxpayers had received the payments owed to them while explaining that officials were dealing with a huge undertaking.

« Achieving this level of accuracy in the limited time frame required significant collaboration between multiple agencies within the Treasury Department, » said Kenneth Corbin, commissioner of the payroll and investment division.