Who wouldn’t want another stimulus check? Government checks were a great help to many families during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) supervised, and systematically failed, the distribution of three separate Economic Impact Payments between 2020 and 2021, which means that handfuls of U.S. taxpayers were often in the position of doing a search for updated information on when they could receive their long-awaited checks.
But it has been discovered that they can generate a lot of traffic by spreading false information about additional controls, every few months since the IRS handed out the last stimulus controls, rumors have been circulating online that a fourth payment, or some variation of it, is necessary.
A novel version of these rumors from incomplete sources make us believe that a payment of $3,500 is in process from the state of California.
Yet another version claims that Social Security recipients will receive a $2,300 stimulus check from the IRS.
Will a New Stimulus Check Really Come?
As you can probably already imagine, there will be no stimulus checks from either the IRS or the California Franchise Tax Board in 2024, federal Economic Impact Payments ended with the third check in 2021, taxpayers who never received them could still apply for them as a recovery refund credit, but only for the fiscal year in which they were generated.
“The IRS no longer generates third economic impact payments,” the agency clearly says on its website, as for the state of California, the state made two installments of its Golden State stimulus payments a few years ago, and a spokesperson confirmed to Fast Company that there are no current plans to provide another, it also did something called a tax refund for the middle class in 2022 and early 2023, but it was a one-time payment generated as a debit card.
In short, any story about the state of California or the federal government attributing new stimulus checks to citizens en masse is completely false, normally, these kinds of fictitious rumors are quite easy to miss, but lately they have been so commonplace (perhaps with the help of AI in some cases) that “$12,000 stimulus checks” became a trending topic in the Google search the week before.
The sad thing is that these rumors give false hope to people who are in a complicated financial situation and really need the money.
What’s Really Going on With This Viral Rumor?
Like many of the fake news or rumors, some of these stories have a little bit of truth. For example, eligible taxpayers may receive a refund from the IRS as part of the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit. The state of California, in the same way, offers its own tax credits throughout the state.
But the tax credits they owe are not the same as the economic stimulus checks, which are (or were) direct payments from the government with the aim of growing the economy, those payments provide a nice financial windfall for the citizens of the United States, affected by COVID, but they are over.
It is worth emphasizing that the tax season is also over, the deadline for filing this year was until April 15th, so, unless you have applied for an extension, you will be very late.