COVID-19 Weekly Digest (May 5, 2021)

A seventh batch of around two million stimulus payments went out last week, bringing the total of payments sent by the IRS to around $384 billion. This latest batch of payments went out primarily to two groups. The first group is people for whom the IRS did not have contact information, but who recently filed a tax return. The second group includes people who received stimulus payments based on their 2019 tax returns, but who were eligible for a larger amount, based on a recently filed 2020 tax return. Nearly 730,000 payments in this latest batch were these “plus-up” payments.