Over 80 million COVID-19 stimulus payments went out on Friday, IRS official says

The official also revealed the IRS is 'literally' holding tons of outgoing mail 'in trailers' until their employees are able to work in-person at service centers

By Nicholas Ballasy

Published: April 13, 2020 1:40pm

Updated: April 13, 2020 4:46pm

The Internal Revenue Service sent out "over 80 million" coronavirus direct payments on Friday, an agency official revealed on Monday.

"We started sending out the economic impact payments on Friday, which is a huge feat for the IRS in the middle of filing season," Sunita Lough, deputy commissioner for services and enforcement at the IRS, said during a Tax Policy Center webinar. "So we started sending those out – over 80 million payments went out Friday and should be hitting people's bank deposits, today, tomorrow or early next week for direct deposit."

Lough continued, "People for whom we have the direct deposit information should be seeing their economic impact payments, which are really needed by many taxpayers, by today or early next week."

Lough discussed the challenges the IRS is facing sending out the direct stimulus payments during the pandemic.

"We've closed all our taxpayer assistance centers because you can't have face-to-face contacts. All our service centers at this point are closed because of shelter in place," Lough said.

"What does it mean? It means the mail is being held. There is so much mail that the post office can't hold it so we [IRS] are literally holding it in trailers until our employees can get back and work through them," she added.