What to do if your stimulus check was sent to the wrong address?
There are about 20 million Americans who have not received their stimulus checks and they are worried that the IRS might have sent it to the wrong address.
The IRS gave an update last Friday that more than 150 million stimulus payments have been made since the CARES Act was approved in mid-March by president Donald Trump. But there are about 20 million more Americans who are still waiting for this aid amid the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
If your stimulus payment was sent to the wrong address there may be some ways to fix the situation. The IRS started depositing money directly to people’s bank accounts, for those who paid the taxes in 2018 and 2019. After that they were sending through the mail checks worth $1,200 to millions of Americans since mid-March for the people who didn’t have a bank account on file.
The IRS sent out 30 million paper checks after 24 April and some of those checks won’t reach people until September. So if your address on file with the IRS is wrong, get ready for a challenging effort to recover your payment.
The IRS says it will mail a letter with information about how and where the stimulus payment was made, but this letter will go to the last address on file. This means that both your stimulus payment and the informational letter will be heading to a place where you no longer live.
One option to try and recover your check is to log on to the USPS website and have your mail forwarded to you from the old address you think might be on file with the IRS, if you haven’t done so already (it costs $1.05 to initiate mail forwarding).
You also could try contacting the people who now live at your old address about the situation, but tracking down who lives there could take some major sleuthing that not everyone is capable of.