I feel like there is a disproportionate focus on relatively small dollar errors and fraud. The point was to get money to people who need it and to keep the economy from collapsing for everyone. Setting up mechanisms to try to catch every mistake would probably have cost more money than it would have saved and definitely would have unnecessarily delayed people getting checks. The stimulus was too small and too slow to begin with.
Yep, this exact point is addressed in the article as well
>"It's awful when we hear of millions of dollars going into the wrong hands," he added, "but it was probably within a somewhat acceptable threshold of error or margin of error" because Congress opted for speed over accuracy when it flooded the U.S. economy with money last spring
I also remember at that time hearing talking heads saying things to the effect of "we are getting money out to everyone now, we'll worry about collecting it back from people who aren't eligible later."
IIRC some federal government money can be withheld if you owe the IRS and most of these recepients seem to be collecting social security so it seems just docking future SS payments to collect back the $1,200 might be the best solution. Even if it can't be collected that way with existing laws, Congress can always pass a law allowing it. Though many checks might not be cashed in the first place if the recipient didn't have an American bank account.
Yes - this was a $2.2 trillion dollar relief bill and the total amount in question is well under $34 million (that number included Americans living abroad). That’s smaller than the amounts individual businesses claimed inappropriately and delaying sending the checks to check all of the recipients would probably have cost more since a lot of that money went straight into the economy paying taxes and keeping people employed.
It was actually much larger. 5 trillion was made to only look like 500 billion, using a technical trick.
Of the 2.2 trillion, 500 billion was set aside for whatever. This was often reported as the part for big business. Actually it's 500b to seed new special purpose banks that can operate with 10 to 1 leverage. So the 500b is actually 5.5t, making the whole bill several times larger than widely discussed.
I'm reminded of the "chain CPI" fiasco where Congress tried to reduce Social Security, but hid it in a technical detail. Except this time Democrats were on board. Neither party challenged the main narrative, and so the media didn't bother to either.
And this is the argument for the U in UBI. You make government services as universal and as easy to acquire as possible. You get more widescale buy-in from the general population because everyone benefits rather than a select group which seems to be a problem with the current discussions around college loan forgiveness. Plus there are all sorts of cost savings that come from reduced bureaucracy that hopefully outweigh the costs from outright fraud or normal mistakes like this.
All the scrutiny and bureaucracy should be on the tax collection side rather than on the service side.
I recall a story about a Congressional Oversight effort to audit for misused funds. They ended up finding something like $100k of sketchy expenditures, but the audit itself cost multiple millions of dollars.
Retail tries to keep 'shrinkage' to a number that is below the threshold of detection to a point they can just built it into their cost models and not worry too much about the rest.
This story is constantly repeated in different variations on the theme. In Florida they decided to drug test people who were getting food stamps but they didn't find anybody because, surprise, poor people can't afford drugs, and they spent a fortune on the drug tests.
The multimillion dollar audits for $100k of corruption makes perfect sense to me.
The goal isn't financial but cultural. You don't want a corrupt culture. At the time you've hit billions of dollars of corruption, it's like termites hollowing out your house structure or COVID19 shutting down your country for 9 months. If killing those first few termites costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS or you were spending A MILLION DOLLARS for each COVID19 case coming into your country to definitely get it under control, it's a bargain.
More than that; the entire point of the $1,200 was to get people money quickly to buy time to work out a longer term solution (some of the proposed longer term solutions happened to involve some form of ongoing stimulus checks modeled after the initial one).
And instead what we got was the PPP and EIDL, the majority of which ended up going to huge corporations (I know Ruth's Chris returned it after the staggering public backlash). And those of us on this forum just worked from home and continued getting our paychecks. I don't know a single person that lives paycheck to paycheck in a working or middle-class job who got anything more than that $1,200.
The problem isn't how it was handled ex-post. The problem is how there was essentially zero infrastructure or preparation in place for this type of fast-disbursement of stimulus.
Surely it couldn't haven been inconceivable to imagine that Congress may want to send widespread stimulus to most everyone with a week or two or turnaround. The 2008 financial crisis was barely more than a decade ago. How hard could it possibly be, in 2020, to setup a secure, cross-verified, system for taxpayers to update their information online?
Defending the incompetence of the Treasury Department, is like defending a cook who burns down the kitchen because he never inspected his fire extinguishers. "What did you expect the guy to do? He had to move fast!"
Whether Congress could want to do something or not is irrelevant to the civil servant. Unless they're directed to make those preparations (and not just plans for the event, but actually start implementing which costs a lot more), they won't.
The distinction I'm making: A plan may take 1-4 weeks to form with 1-10 participants. They could tell you exactly what's needed in order to implement a stimulus check program like this safely and accurately. But the implementation is going to take weeks or months more work and 10-1000 participants to effect it.
The planning is "cheap" and done as a matter of course. That covers things like disaster recover and conops. But it doesn't, on its own, actually create a final "product". Only the plan for what to do when an emergency or directive comes down the pipe.
The implementation is expensive. And they need authority to execute it. If they're not funded for it, they aren't going to do it.
> How hard could it possibly be, in 2020, to setup a secure, cross-verified, system for taxpayers to update their information online?
Pretty difficult. People don't want to update, don't have access to computers, some are here living and working and aren't citizens or are undocumented, some people don't trust the government or don't want the government tracking them anymore than they already do. You name it.
Even if you didn't have these systematic issues, it's a political football. Can't ask the wrong questions on the census b/c politics, for example. How would you even know that every American eligible got a check if you can't even get a count of every American?
Decades back, Congress starved the IRS of infrastructure funds as a means of kneecapping it. Innovative programs (IRS-CAWR, etc) were prototyped, hugely successful (first year brought in several $100M for one service center), but then nationwide rollout was dragged out for years for lack of HW.
I doubt much has changed and things are cobbled together. Like all large legacy environments, reimagining is costly, complex and prone to high failure rates. They should never move off the mainframe.
>The problem isn't how it was handled ex-post. The problem is how there was essentially zero infrastructure or preparation in place for this type of fast-disbursement of stimulus.
Isn't there? The Fed (and monetary economists) always talk about how much easier it would be to stimulate with a "helicopter drop"[0], wouldn't they already know how to pull that off?
Even if it were done by Congress rather than the Fed, the Fed's process could still be the delivery mechanism.
If you want the government to be capable of something you need to spend money on that capacity. Having efficient systems in place come with a real cost, so simply saying their less than perfect isn’t enough you need to justify the waste vs what it would have taken to avoid it.
Completely agree. The real scandal has been egregious unemployment claims fraud. Hundreds of millions from California alone, and multiple states have been targeted[0].
There's also fraud from the money that's supposed to go to small businesses. My family lives in Chicago and it feels like their entire neighborhood all got $10,000 by pretending to be small businesses, and they teach each other how to do it. Everyone they know has gotten money from that and its become a meme ("did you buy that coat with your 10K check?"). My family is trying their best to resist also throwing in some applications to just get a piece of that.
There is, and it's because there is a segment of the population that has been indoctrinated to believe that the government provides no useful function other than criminal prosecution and military services. Any waste or small errors (in the larger scheme) are an alarming cause for concern in their minds and proof that government is dysfunctional by default.
As with anything with government and helpful programs, a large part of the US thinks, 'It doesn't matter that millions are helped, that a handful was able to take advantage means we should get rid of it'
Yes. It’s as if sending out hundreds of millions of checks during an unprecedented economic crisis might be somewhat of a challenge for the people who have to make it happen on an instantaneously urgent basis...
I came to make the same point. Speed was more important than accuracy. These types of articles are just cheap shots that make the program look bad, when in fact it was an unmitigated success.
Well, this is only one error in one program. Do you think an organization that makes this kind of mistake will make only one? And if it makes more mistakes, how likely is it that the IRS will find them and reveal them?
But the checks have long stopped yet the economy has not collapsed. THE S&P 500 made new highs. Corporate earnings are still very strong. Although unemployment is higher than usual, the economy is far from collapse or recession. The 3 quarter GDP up 33% and forecasts for q4 and 2021 remain strong in spite of checks stopping. This narrative that the economy hinges on stimulus checks is part of the media and political spin.
Food insecurity and food bank use is at record highs among US residents this year. That's a considerably better indicator of real economic health than any index.
Ironically, the idea you're pushing, something like "this doesn't really matter, the important thing is the government giving people money, the more the better, who even cares if they're American," precisely represents the best objections to the welfare state. Which are its shoddiness, its lack of administrative rigor, and so on. These objections raise the question: can a welfare state be effective if it's administered so poorly? If the American government is sending money to Swedes, can we trust it to send money to "people who need it"?
Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
> the idea you're pushing, something like "this doesn't really matter, the important thing is the government giving people money, the more the better, who even cares if they're American,"
I'm almost unsure how to reply because you seem to ignore the central point of the comment you're replying to. Your characterization omits the most salient point: That it had to be done fast. I don't see how the tradeoffs in emergency distribution of funds are in any way indicative of whether you can trust welfare states to be administered properly or not. The comment was precisely about "lack of administrative rigor" being warranted in favor of preventing greater harm.
> Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
I don't understand how this point relates to the general value of welfare systems that you are discussing. Are you saying an American welfare system has to be inherently less reliable? Or that there are more Americans than Swedes so statistically Sweden will receive more accidental checks from America than the reverse? Could you elaborate?
> Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens?
Generally, yes, if they worked for some time in Sweden. There is probably a non-zero error rate associated with that too. It's not like the gov't is sending checks to random Swedes - they were sent based on available sufficient tax criteria not originally intended to be used for entitlement distribution.
I do suspect most countries wouldn't have a problem on the scale the US might because a) they have larger, simpler entitlement programs (qualifications tend to be based on a a small number of straightforward residency classes), and b) they do not generally process any tax paperwork from non-residents. It is the US's stinginess and paradoxical fear of inefficiency that hurts it here.
In the Nordic countries, people often know personally someone who has managed to live on the dole for years and years in spite of being totally able-bodied and capable of working; the person would simply prefer to spend their lives playing video games or toking or whatever. That is rather unfair and that person might be called a leech, but still few would want to rock the boat and end the welfare state just to eliminate those cases. So, indeed, in the Nordic countries people are prepared to accept some fraud and mismanagement to keep the overall system going.
I think the real irony here is that the best rebuttal to your point is the exact comment that you replied to.
The amount in question is less than 0.0011%. Literally a thousandth of a precent.
Meanwhile the result was keeping hundreds of millions afloat of Americans (at least until we decided to abandon them again for the sake of politics)
Besides, since when is a leaner government protection against an incompetent government? We're literally watching thousands of Americans die as proof this theory of "the less my government does the less it can do wrong" is completely nonsensical
I think it’s important to remember that one of the goals during this process was speed. The government could surly be more accurate in their distribution of the 1,200$, but it would come at the expense of time. Getting the stimulus check in 2021 would be worth way less.
I don't agree that the effort was shoddy and I don't think any errors made in standing up a new government program in a matter of weeks, with a mandate to move as quickly as possible, and in the middle of a pandemic say anything useful about the concept of welfare in general
This is nothing compared to how much money the Army loses over seas. Here is a case of 70 billion of literal pallets of cash going 'missing' [q] [y] [z]
Please read the linked articles again. They do not say that $70B went missing. Afghan & Iraqi national banks had money in US banks. They requested the money so the US banks sent it. The US military delivered it.
I never know what I'm supposed to do when I gain this kind of information.
Nothing is really going to change in my life time regarding the government of the United States and its inefficient spending, is it? No matter who we vote for or what we believe is right... it's pretty much always going to be the same story with the same problems and overall no change, right? Is it worth reading about/getting worked up over?
One Danish newspaper covered this when the checks arrived earlier in the year. The issue they focused on was the fact that the checks are basically worthless. Most Danish banks had no idea how to handle them.
Part of the problem is that checks where fased out almost four years ago. To handle the checks the banks would need an American partner bank, but it’s still more trouble that most banks are willing to deal with and they aren’t obligated to cash in checks anymore.
Same situation here in Sweden. Nobody would take it. We set up a Facebook group to find solutions, the easiest one being just getting a US bank account. It's really considered a stone age system here.
Most banks are even wary on having emigrated Americans as customers, as that is also a lot of headaches. (One of few countries where one still in theory have to tax even when no longer living there)
Meanwhile, actual US citizens who were married to somebody with an ITIN (for example, my wife is in the process of getting her immigrant visa and green card), got $0 stimulus money whatsoever. Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them?
It wasn’t “the administration.” The $1,200 stimulus is structured as a refundable tax credit. The CARES Act itself—which was enacted by a Democratic House and Republican Senate—clearly requires everyone filing a joint return to have a valid SSN. Section 2201(g) says:
> (g) IDENTIFICATION NUMBER REQUIREMENT.—
‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—No credit shall be allowed under subsection (a) to an eligible individual who does not include on the return of tax for the taxable year—
‘‘(A) such individual’s valid identification number,
‘‘(B) in the case of a joint return, the valid identification number of such individual’s spouse, and
‘‘(C) in the case of any qualifying child taken into account under subsection (a)(2), the valid identification number of such qualifying child.
> ‘‘(2) VALID IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.—
‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the term ‘valid identification number’ means a social security number (as such term is defined in section 24(h)(7)).
Ah yes, the clause that neatly manages to exclude tax payers who have ITNs that look and at filing time function just like an SSN but somehow are neatly trimmed out here, I wonder how that got in there...
To add to this, as I understand it if you have a SS card with the words “not valid for employment” then the IRS doesn’t consider it valid for the stimulus, even if you’ve been filing W2s for years. You have to apply for a new card so the SS database gets updated with the fact that you have a valid SSN.
At least that’s what I’m hoping, so my wife and I can finally collect that $2400 on our next tax return.
>Apparently the administration was trying to punish people married to illegal immigrants, and all the people suffering through the legal and extremely slow immigration process get bundled in with them
They say that, but under Stephen Miller almost every single aspect of legal immigration has been made harder, slower and more expensive than before. After all Steve Bannon said the high number of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley is not compatible with a civic society and that it's worth it for the US to lose economically while restricting legal immigration.
Now, that may be the media soundbite, the actual numbers may surprise you.
In 2015, under the obama administration, out of 531k immigrant visas (green cards), only 21k were for employment based categories, with 8600 for investors (visas for sale), and only 11k for EB1,2,3 categories (that is high skilled employees of companies and academics/professors in universities).
In 2019, out of 462k green cards, there were 28k employment visas, with 16k for EB1,2,3 categories.
So, an asian would have a better opportunity to get a green card and subsequently become CEO under the trump administration. Both republcians and democrats want this feature of preventing high skilled immigration.
Claim it on your taxes... the $1200 was just basically a tax credit given ahead of time. If you qualify, you can claim it in January... won't help you today :(
The rules are even weirder than that. The advance tax credit doesn't have to be repaid even if 2020 income makes one qualify for a smaller amount than actually received or for no payment at all. But if 2020 income is low enough to qualify for a higher payment, you do get to claim the difference on the 2020 tax return.
Even weirder, if your payment would be different between 2018 and 2019 income, the actual payment the law granted earlier this year depended on which returns had been filed at the time the IRS determined eligibility, with no adjustment for subsequent filings.
I qualified for my full payment based on my 2018 income, would not have qualified for anything based on my 2019 income, and did not expect to qualify for 2020 either (although the impact of the pandemic means I actually would). I made sure not to file my 2019 tax return until after I got my payment.
Very badly designed legislation, though there may not have been much alternative if they wanted to act quickly.
It seemed to work for those with a green card, at least, though I was sort of worried that it would be counted as 'public assistance' for the purposes of the 'public charge' rule that's now being enforced. Seems that it's not being considered as such, though, at least according to the lawyer I talked to.
So long as you got your SSN (which I hear are printed much faster than green cards) you should have gotten it. Thankfully public charge rule is on the way out, and I wish you a smooth journey to citizenship without that policy looming much longer :D
It's annoying but can't you file separately instead of jointly for your 2020 return?
If I'm interpreting the statute correctly, you'd then receive the stimulus next year. (Since anyone who didn't receive it but is qualified will receive it on their 2020 return, filed in 2021.)
Yes, but that’s going to be six-twelve months later than it should have been. And for some people, the penalty for filing separately will outweigh $1200 - such as single income households.
I can't find any mention in the article that this will obviously be corrected next year.
Because the $1,200 checks are just an advance refund on your 2020 tax return (to file in 2021).
If you get and cash a stimulus check you don't deserve, you'll need to pay it back on your return next year.
Just like if you didn't get a stimulus check you deserved because of IRS mixup (like me), you'll just get it as an additional refund on your return next year.
Considering the speed these checks got sent out, there were bound to be errors. It's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem because everything will be properly sorted out on the actual tax returns.
Some people in the article either have no ties to the US at all or have renounced US citizenship, so it _will not_ be corrected next year as they don't file tax returns.
Regardless, this is chump change to the US government, and there are other larger lost amounts of money they should probably worry about anyway.
If you owe money to the IRS, you need to file a tax return whether you're a US citizen or not.
Now you might say, well what is the US gonna do if you don't?
Well, the people mentioned in the article receive Social Security (so "no ties to the US at all" is false), and you can 100% expect their SS checks to be garnished to cover debt to the IRS, as this happens all the time with unpaid back taxes.
So it's not going to be any free money at the end of the day.
The whole process would obviously take a few years, but literally all the systems are already in place for it. Nothing special even needs to be done. It'll just happen.
> Just like if you didn't get a stimulus check you deserved because of IRS mixup (like me), you'll just get it as an additional refund on your return next year.
Can you elaborate on this? After months of waiting and calling the IRS with nothing to show for it, I just assumed that I would never see any of that money.
If you didn't receive the check, there will be a section on your 2020 1040 tax form for "Recovery Rebate Credit" which seems to be the catch-all for anyone who missed the deadlines or didn't get their full amount for whatever reason.
I'm an American overseas who pays his taxes, has intent to return, yada yada and never received my check, and never got the online portal to recognize me, so I'm hoping this will work.
Yeah, calling the IRS about this is beyond useless. Eventually they give you the way to contact someone who they claim will be able to verify your perceived eligibility in their eyes, but every time I've done that (after hours on hold) the call disconnects for some reason or their system goes down or ...
At this rate, it will be faster to file my return ASAP than to try to get my stimulus check.
It’s made clearer in the text, but the conflation of “citizen” and “resident” here is a common irritant that makes it really difficult to understand just what non-citizens are entitled to.
The issue here isn’t that they were sent to non-citizens (I am not a citizen and received a stimulus I’m fully entitled to) but that they were sent to non-citizen non-residents. I wouldn’t be surprised if this persistent mistake contributes to animosity towards immigrants.
The way it's gone for me is last year converted my company from S-corp to sole proprietorship. This was done because my state (NJ) was paying out unemployment claims to people I have never met (in NY) and providing me with no way to contest this other than to retain an attorney and file in superior court. The conversion had some minor tax implications but otherwise would allow me to draw instead of pay myself a salary subject to unemployment taxes. For 3 months this year I was out of operation due to COVID, during which time CARES Act was supposed to pay unemployment + $600/wk to sole proprietors. Stuck pending since April, expect to never see it. I have sent letters, faxes, spoken to court clerks, assemblymen, reported to unemployment's investigators regarding the false claims I had for a few years before COVID hit, and I was never able to get a resolution.
Regarding the IRS end, no check here. The CARES act wasn't written for people who didn't file in 2018 but were required to file in 2019. It explicitly said to not use the non-filer option if a 2019 return was required. I'm still trying to get my ID verified with the IRS (I haven't moved, they accepted 2 corporate returns last year with my name on them, and I've never hit this requirement before). I do not expect to see a check from them either. Nobody there to answer the phone for weeks now.
I did, however, receive one soft notice from the IRS notifying me that I should review and re-submit a return from (I think?) 2012 or 2013 for unreported bitcoin transactions. Yeah... I'll get right on that.
You should know that a company called Phunware, which built Trump's campaign app, received 3x as much CARES stimulus per capita than anybody was supposed to get. If you voted Republican and donated to the GOP you are way more likely to get CARES checks.
They're a horoscope company which ripped off "investors" for $40m in a scam ICO 3 years ago, and they donated heavily to Trump.
I don't understand why they're making a news story out of this $34 million dollar error without mentioning that they also sent $1.7 billion to the deceased. Neither seem newsworthy to me, but only detailing the cheapest error is strange.
Eh this one doesn’t seem that strange to me. People die every day, a lot of them. Sending a check to an American that died and hasn’t been reported upwards to the federal government is not surprising. Sending money to non Americans who are not in America is a bit of a head scratcher. How did that even happen? I don’t care enough about 34 million dollars to look any further into it but I am curious about who these people are and how they got sent checks by the US government. Did they live here once upon a time and left? That would make sense to me, not dissimilar from the dead not dead people, just stale data and speed was the stated goal so stale data is to be expected.
Those noncitizens mentioned in the article all happen to receive social security payments from the US, due to having worked there in the past.
> Asked about this by NPR, the IRS acknowledged it mistakenly sent checks to some noncitizens who receive Social Security and other federal benefits — such as Wigforss, who receives a small Social Security payment from having worked in California for several years
Also, why is this story on the frontpage? If it wasn't an NPR story would it gain any traction here? Not only is it not newsworthy, it is uninteresting. It's more spam than news.
Readit News
>"It's awful when we hear of millions of dollars going into the wrong hands," he added, "but it was probably within a somewhat acceptable threshold of error or margin of error" because Congress opted for speed over accuracy when it flooded the U.S. economy with money last spring
I also remember at that time hearing talking heads saying things to the effect of "we are getting money out to everyone now, we'll worry about collecting it back from people who aren't eligible later."
IIRC some federal government money can be withheld if you owe the IRS and most of these recepients seem to be collecting social security so it seems just docking future SS payments to collect back the $1,200 might be the best solution. Even if it can't be collected that way with existing laws, Congress can always pass a law allowing it. Though many checks might not be cashed in the first place if the recipient didn't have an American bank account.
Of the 2.2 trillion, 500 billion was set aside for whatever. This was often reported as the part for big business. Actually it's 500b to seed new special purpose banks that can operate with 10 to 1 leverage. So the 500b is actually 5.5t, making the whole bill several times larger than widely discussed.
I'm reminded of the "chain CPI" fiasco where Congress tried to reduce Social Security, but hid it in a technical detail. Except this time Democrats were on board. Neither party challenged the main narrative, and so the media didn't bother to either.
All the scrutiny and bureaucracy should be on the tax collection side rather than on the service side.
Retail tries to keep 'shrinkage' to a number that is below the threshold of detection to a point they can just built it into their cost models and not worry too much about the rest.
The goal isn't financial but cultural. You don't want a corrupt culture. At the time you've hit billions of dollars of corruption, it's like termites hollowing out your house structure or COVID19 shutting down your country for 9 months. If killing those first few termites costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS or you were spending A MILLION DOLLARS for each COVID19 case coming into your country to definitely get it under control, it's a bargain.
Surely it couldn't haven been inconceivable to imagine that Congress may want to send widespread stimulus to most everyone with a week or two or turnaround. The 2008 financial crisis was barely more than a decade ago. How hard could it possibly be, in 2020, to setup a secure, cross-verified, system for taxpayers to update their information online?
Defending the incompetence of the Treasury Department, is like defending a cook who burns down the kitchen because he never inspected his fire extinguishers. "What did you expect the guy to do? He had to move fast!"
The distinction I'm making: A plan may take 1-4 weeks to form with 1-10 participants. They could tell you exactly what's needed in order to implement a stimulus check program like this safely and accurately. But the implementation is going to take weeks or months more work and 10-1000 participants to effect it.
The planning is "cheap" and done as a matter of course. That covers things like disaster recover and conops. But it doesn't, on its own, actually create a final "product". Only the plan for what to do when an emergency or directive comes down the pipe.
The implementation is expensive. And they need authority to execute it. If they're not funded for it, they aren't going to do it.
Pretty difficult. People don't want to update, don't have access to computers, some are here living and working and aren't citizens or are undocumented, some people don't trust the government or don't want the government tracking them anymore than they already do. You name it.
Even if you didn't have these systematic issues, it's a political football. Can't ask the wrong questions on the census b/c politics, for example. How would you even know that every American eligible got a check if you can't even get a count of every American?
I doubt much has changed and things are cobbled together. Like all large legacy environments, reimagining is costly, complex and prone to high failure rates. They should never move off the mainframe.
Isn't there? The Fed (and monetary economists) always talk about how much easier it would be to stimulate with a "helicopter drop"[0], wouldn't they already know how to pull that off?
Even if it were done by Congress rather than the Fed, the Fed's process could still be the delivery mechanism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/us/california-unemploymen...
There's also fraud from the money that's supposed to go to small businesses. My family lives in Chicago and it feels like their entire neighborhood all got $10,000 by pretending to be small businesses, and they teach each other how to do it. Everyone they know has gotten money from that and its become a meme ("did you buy that coat with your 10K check?"). My family is trying their best to resist also throwing in some applications to just get a piece of that.
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Maybe because all those metrics have almost no correlation how a below median income household operates.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/nov/25/us-hunger-surge...
Why don't you ask the waitress at Denny's who's had her hours cut in half how the S&P 500 affects her?
Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
I'm almost unsure how to reply because you seem to ignore the central point of the comment you're replying to. Your characterization omits the most salient point: That it had to be done fast. I don't see how the tradeoffs in emergency distribution of funds are in any way indicative of whether you can trust welfare states to be administered properly or not. The comment was precisely about "lack of administrative rigor" being warranted in favor of preventing greater harm.
> Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
I don't understand how this point relates to the general value of welfare systems that you are discussing. Are you saying an American welfare system has to be inherently less reliable? Or that there are more Americans than Swedes so statistically Sweden will receive more accidental checks from America than the reverse? Could you elaborate?
I mean, they sent what, $34m overseas erroneously of $2T?
Doing some quick napkin math, for every $1,000,000 spent, $10 accidentally went overseas?
Why does this seem poor to you? That seems like less than a rounding error in a rounding error....
It works out to $10 erroneous dollars for every $1,000,000. That's 99.999% accuracy and that doesn't sound shoddy to me at all.
Generally, yes, if they worked for some time in Sweden. There is probably a non-zero error rate associated with that too. It's not like the gov't is sending checks to random Swedes - they were sent based on available sufficient tax criteria not originally intended to be used for entitlement distribution.
I do suspect most countries wouldn't have a problem on the scale the US might because a) they have larger, simpler entitlement programs (qualifications tend to be based on a a small number of straightforward residency classes), and b) they do not generally process any tax paperwork from non-residents. It is the US's stinginess and paradoxical fear of inefficiency that hurts it here.
The amount in question is less than 0.0011%. Literally a thousandth of a precent.
Meanwhile the result was keeping hundreds of millions afloat of Americans (at least until we decided to abandon them again for the sake of politics)
Besides, since when is a leaner government protection against an incompetent government? We're literally watching thousands of Americans die as proof this theory of "the less my government does the less it can do wrong" is completely nonsensical
[q] https://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-centra...
[y] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pa...
[z] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-...
Nothing is really going to change in my life time regarding the government of the United States and its inefficient spending, is it? No matter who we vote for or what we believe is right... it's pretty much always going to be the same story with the same problems and overall no change, right? Is it worth reading about/getting worked up over?
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Part of the problem is that checks where fased out almost four years ago. To handle the checks the banks would need an American partner bank, but it’s still more trouble that most banks are willing to deal with and they aren’t obligated to cash in checks anymore.
> (g) IDENTIFICATION NUMBER REQUIREMENT.— ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—No credit shall be allowed under subsection (a) to an eligible individual who does not include on the return of tax for the taxable year— ‘‘(A) such individual’s valid identification number, ‘‘(B) in the case of a joint return, the valid identification number of such individual’s spouse, and ‘‘(C) in the case of any qualifying child taken into account under subsection (a)(2), the valid identification number of such qualifying child.
> ‘‘(2) VALID IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.— ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the term ‘valid identification number’ means a social security number (as such term is defined in section 24(h)(7)).
At least that’s what I’m hoping, so my wife and I can finally collect that $2400 on our next tax return.
They say that, but under Stephen Miller almost every single aspect of legal immigration has been made harder, slower and more expensive than before. After all Steve Bannon said the high number of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley is not compatible with a civic society and that it's worth it for the US to lose economically while restricting legal immigration.
So what you encountered was a feature, not a bug.
In 2015, under the obama administration, out of 531k immigrant visas (green cards), only 21k were for employment based categories, with 8600 for investors (visas for sale), and only 11k for EB1,2,3 categories (that is high skilled employees of companies and academics/professors in universities).
In 2019, out of 462k green cards, there were 28k employment visas, with 16k for EB1,2,3 categories.
So, an asian would have a better opportunity to get a green card and subsequently become CEO under the trump administration. Both republcians and democrats want this feature of preventing high skilled immigration.
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual... [2] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
Even weirder, if your payment would be different between 2018 and 2019 income, the actual payment the law granted earlier this year depended on which returns had been filed at the time the IRS determined eligibility, with no adjustment for subsequent filings.
I qualified for my full payment based on my 2018 income, would not have qualified for anything based on my 2019 income, and did not expect to qualify for 2020 either (although the impact of the pandemic means I actually would). I made sure not to file my 2019 tax return until after I got my payment.
Very badly designed legislation, though there may not have been much alternative if they wanted to act quickly.
If I'm interpreting the statute correctly, you'd then receive the stimulus next year. (Since anyone who didn't receive it but is qualified will receive it on their 2020 return, filed in 2021.)
Because the $1,200 checks are just an advance refund on your 2020 tax return (to file in 2021).
If you get and cash a stimulus check you don't deserve, you'll need to pay it back on your return next year.
Just like if you didn't get a stimulus check you deserved because of IRS mixup (like me), you'll just get it as an additional refund on your return next year.
Considering the speed these checks got sent out, there were bound to be errors. It's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem because everything will be properly sorted out on the actual tax returns.
Regardless, this is chump change to the US government, and there are other larger lost amounts of money they should probably worry about anyway.
Now you might say, well what is the US gonna do if you don't?
Well, the people mentioned in the article receive Social Security (so "no ties to the US at all" is false), and you can 100% expect their SS checks to be garnished to cover debt to the IRS, as this happens all the time with unpaid back taxes.
So it's not going to be any free money at the end of the day.
The whole process would obviously take a few years, but literally all the systems are already in place for it. Nothing special even needs to be done. It'll just happen.
Can you elaborate on this? After months of waiting and calling the IRS with nothing to show for it, I just assumed that I would never see any of that money.
I'm an American overseas who pays his taxes, has intent to return, yada yada and never received my check, and never got the online portal to recognize me, so I'm hoping this will work.
Source: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/economic-impact-payment-informa...
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At this rate, it will be faster to file my return ASAP than to try to get my stimulus check.
Not if you're not American and overseas?
I mean, if some random country sends me free money I don't think I have any obligation to return it, and I don't think the US is particularly special.
The issue here isn’t that they were sent to non-citizens (I am not a citizen and received a stimulus I’m fully entitled to) but that they were sent to non-citizen non-residents. I wouldn’t be surprised if this persistent mistake contributes to animosity towards immigrants.
The way it's gone for me is last year converted my company from S-corp to sole proprietorship. This was done because my state (NJ) was paying out unemployment claims to people I have never met (in NY) and providing me with no way to contest this other than to retain an attorney and file in superior court. The conversion had some minor tax implications but otherwise would allow me to draw instead of pay myself a salary subject to unemployment taxes. For 3 months this year I was out of operation due to COVID, during which time CARES Act was supposed to pay unemployment + $600/wk to sole proprietors. Stuck pending since April, expect to never see it. I have sent letters, faxes, spoken to court clerks, assemblymen, reported to unemployment's investigators regarding the false claims I had for a few years before COVID hit, and I was never able to get a resolution.
Regarding the IRS end, no check here. The CARES act wasn't written for people who didn't file in 2018 but were required to file in 2019. It explicitly said to not use the non-filer option if a 2019 return was required. I'm still trying to get my ID verified with the IRS (I haven't moved, they accepted 2 corporate returns last year with my name on them, and I've never hit this requirement before). I do not expect to see a check from them either. Nobody there to answer the phone for weeks now.
I did, however, receive one soft notice from the IRS notifying me that I should review and re-submit a return from (I think?) 2012 or 2013 for unreported bitcoin transactions. Yeah... I'll get right on that.
They're a horoscope company which ripped off "investors" for $40m in a scam ICO 3 years ago, and they donated heavily to Trump.
> Asked about this by NPR, the IRS acknowledged it mistakenly sent checks to some noncitizens who receive Social Security and other federal benefits — such as Wigforss, who receives a small Social Security payment from having worked in California for several years