We knew COVID-19 was going to have an effect on tax return processing, but we didn’t know it would still be going on. Honestly, the IRS didn’t think it would either. During the midst of the pandemic, a lot of federal offices closed, including the IRS. While they were closed they continued to receive millions and millions of tax returns. Those tax returns were stored in tractor trailers at their locations. Once they reopened, they began to process these returns. On top of that, they began to issue the stimulus payments.
As many of you probably already know, there are significant delays in receiving both stimulus payments and your federal return payments. The IRS has portals to check the statuses of both these (at irs.gov) but millions of people are still receiving error messages or messages saying their information cannot be found. Those responses are actually common and they mean that the IRS has not yet processed your 2019 tax return. The stimulus payments were issued based on your 2018 or 2019 tax returns; so if you hadn’t filed 2019 when they were sending stimulus payments they went off of your 2018 tax return. If you’ve recently sent in your 2019 tax return and still have not received your stimulus, do not worry! They didn’t forgot about you and if fact will apply it to your 2020 taxes as a payment there.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done at this point in time except to wait on the IRS. Keep checking their website (and only their website!) for any updates on your tax refund and stimulus payment.
State tax refunds should not be effected, so you will and have most likely received that. Attached is a recent article posted in the AJC regarding the COVID-19 effect on the IRS.
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