IRS Wrongly Sent $448 Million in Recovery Rebate Credits

The IRS wrongly sent about $448 million in pandemic relief to over 300,000 taxpayers, the agency’s watchdog found in a report Thursday.

The recovery rebate tax credit was meant to help taxpayers recover from the pandemic, though had low uptake at first. The IRS subsequently began automating payments and, in 2025, issued 1.2 million payments totaling $2.4 billion, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said.

In addition to asking taxpayers to return the wrongly made payments, the IRS will use refund offsets to recover the cash. The IRS has already recovered about 29,000 of the payments, the ...