New round of $1,400 stimulus checks brings total amount sent to about $391 billion

Personal finance

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A new batch of $1,400 stimulus has been sent, bringing the total number of payments almost 167 million, for a total of approximately $391 billion.

Since the American Rescue Plan Act was passed by Congress in March, the IRS, Treasury Department and Bureau of the Fiscal Service have announced new sets of direct payments issued to Americans.

While those announcements usually come weekly, this new deployment represents two weeks’ worth of cash.

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This tranche includes more than 1.8 million payments worth more than $3.5 billion. More than 900,000 of those checks were sent via direct deposit, and the rest were delivered via paper checks.

Most of the checks that continue to be issued are directed at taxpayers who are due additional money — so-called “plus-up” payments — now that their returns have been processed. In addition, new checks are also being sent to Americans who typically do not file taxes, but recently did so in order to claim the stimulus money.

This round included more than 900,000 “plus-up” payments, representing more than $1.6 billion. To date, the government has sent almost 7 million of those payments.

In addition, the government also sent more than 900,000 payments, for a total of about $1.9 billion, to people who it did not previously have on record but whose tax returns it recently processed.

The legislation that was passed in March allocated about $410 billion to the third round of checks.

In total, about 472 million payments through the first, second and third stimulus rounds have been delivered, for a total of more than $807 billion, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said during testimony on Capitol Hill last week.

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