Are you still waiting for one of those coveted tax refunds related to 2020 unemployment compensation? If so, it might be worth checking your tax transcript this week.
Some recipients of the refunds have been posting on social media, including in Facebook groups, to say they’ve been given a payment date of July 28. That’s this Wednesday.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tends to send these payments out in batches, meaning lots of recipients end up with similar dates. Earlier this month, when the agency announced it had sent out 4 million new checks, many people took to Twitter and elsewhere to say they’d received a date of July 14, which was also a Wednesday.
The IRS still has not provided an estimated timeline for when the next round of checks will be delivered, except to say that payments will continue throughout the summer.
Reached for comment, an IRS spokesperson did not offer any additional specifics, but said the agency is working on a news release with more information planned for this week.
The unemployment refunds were first announced in March and are the result of changes to the tax law authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act, which excluded up to $10,200 in taxable income from unemployment compensation received in 2020. Those changes resulted in an overpayment for millions of taxpayers who filed before the act was passed.
The IRS has said it identified some 13 million taxpayers who may be eligible for an adjustment as a result of the new law, although not all of them will receive refunds. It is correcting returns manually and said that most taxpayers won’t have to file an amended return. So far, the IRS has announced that almost 7 million unemployment refunds have been distributed, and it has cited an average refund amount of $1,265.
You can typically request your tax transcript online or via mail, which reflects new payments as they come. To find out how to do that, visit the IRS’s Get Transcript. Good luck!
This story has been updated with a response from the IRS.
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