The US government mistakenly handed out $1.4 billion to dead people as part of efforts to prop up the economy during the coronavirus lockdown, a Government watchdog has reported.
US taxpayers were sent more than 130 million payments to help support them after a huge spike in unemployment following lockdown, as part of a $2.4 trillion coronavirus relief package in March.
But the Government Accountability Office, which audits congress, revealed on Thursday how many payments had been made in error to more than a million dead taxpayers.
The mistake was inevitable, tax experts say - because of a lag in reporting on who has died.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the US tax collection body, did not use death records to prevent payments to people who had died for the first three batches of payments because of the particular legal interpretation the agency was using, the report said.
The IRS asked in May for the money back from the deceased taxpayers’ survivors. Some legal experts have said the government may not have the legal authority to require that it be returned.
But the report recommended providing agencies access to a more complete set of US government death data.
It added: "We urge Congress to provide the Department of the Treasury with access to the Social Security Administration’s full set of death records, and to require that the Department of the Treasury consistently use it."
