The IRS provided tools for tax practitioners who can use them to reach out and contact to taxpayers who don’t normally file their tax returns and are qualified to get economic impact payments due to current COVID-19 crises. The IRS announced that such individuals will soon get economic impact payments whose payments were diverted to pay their spouse’s past due child support.

Eligible individuals can receive an economic impact payment (or recovery rebate) of up to $1,200 for individuals or $2,400 for married couples and parents can also get $500 for each qualified child under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, P.L. 116-136. However individuals who are eligible but did not filed their tax return for 2018 or 2019 may have not received a payment.

The IRS has created e-posters, ready-to-use articles, a toolkit, and other resources that can be downloaded and shared, to help tax practitioners to reach such individuals and aware them about their eligibility to receive payments. The goal is to inform qualified individuals that they can go to the IRS’s Non-Filers tools until Oct 15, 2020.

The IRS also announced that it will shortly send economic impact payments to those approximately 50,000 individuals, whose portion of the payment was redirected to pay their spouse’s past-due child support. The IRS expects to send these payments by mid of September. The IRS will be mailing checks to any qualified spouse who filed Form 8379, Injured Spouse Allocation, with his/ her 2019 tax return, or in some scenarios, his/ her 2018 tax return. The spouses who are eligible for such payments but did not file Form 8379 will also receive a payment, but IRS is currently uncertain when these payments will be issued.