What to Do If You Still Haven’t Received Your Assistance Checks
After the last check was sent out by the IRS on January 15 , most people should have received all their payments by now. But if you’re still waiting for yours, here are some reasons your check is delayed and what you can do about it.
First, confirm your status with the IRS.
IRS reports that the delivery of the check by mail can take anywhere from three to four weeks, so perhaps you will soon receive your check or EIP card in the mail. But what if the check is lost? Or maybe you got a direct deposit on the first check, but not on the second? All sorts of scenarios are involved here, so start with the IRS Get My Payment tool and check the status of your payment.
If payments for both relief checks were sent, you will be told the date of payment and the method — direct transfer or mail — for each check. Using this tool, you will know if a check has fallen and get a better idea of when it might arrive.
Otherwise, if the tool gives you the status of “payment status not available”, you may not be eligible for preferential checks (the first and second checks can be calculated here and here , respectively), or you may be eligible, but the IRS can’t send payment for some reason. And if you received the status “additional information needed”, it means that you are eligible, but the direct translation was not possible.
Unclear and vague? This is the IRS . However, if you are not already eligible, all of these scenarios lead to the same solution: you will need to claim money as a ” Repayable Recovery Credit ” on your 2020 tax return (look for line 30 on your tax form 1040 ) … which the IRS will begin accepting on February 12th. Unfortunately, due to the fact that check delivery is out of season, tax returns will be your only option.
How do I know if my checks are lost?
This depends on whether the IRS has confirmed that the payment was sent and how long it takes to receive the payment. If the payment takes too long, you can request a so-called tracking payment .
Don’t worry too much, though: tracking payments doesn’t send you another check. It simply confirms that the check was not cashed, allowing the IRS to cancel the check. This will give you the right, you guessed it, to get a returnable recovery loan on your 2020 tax return.
The IRS advises that they will only service payment tracking requests after a certain amount of time. For the first check, you can request payment tracking:
- Five days after direct transfer
- Four weeks from the date the check is sent to the standard address
- Six weeks from the date the check was sent to the forwarding address
- Nine weeks from the date the check was sent to the foreign address
For a second relief check:
- Five days after direct transfer.
- February 24, 2021 if the check was sent to a standard address
- March 10, 2021 if a check was sent to a forwarding address
- March 31, 2021 if the check was sent to a foreign address
Kiplinger has a thorough step-by-step guide for filing a Payment Trace here .
This post was originally published on July 28, 2020 and has been updated on January 27, 2021 to include new information.