The August child tax credit payment is in the mail — or headed directly to your bank account.
The Internal Revenue Service has sent more than $15 billion to the parents of roughly 61 million children, the agency said Friday. The second monthly installment of the beefed-up credit — up to $300 for each child up to age 6 and $250 for each one age 6 through 17 — benefits an additional 1.6 million kids as the agency locates more eligible families. Most parents receive the funds automatically. But the agency is also trying to reach low-income households who likely will not get the payments because they either did not file 2020 or 2019 tax returns or have not used the IRS tool to claim their coronavirus stimulus checks. The agency already has a portal for these low-income families to register to receive the child tax credit payments, but it has been criticized because the tool is only in English and does not work well on cell phones. So in coming weeks, a new mobile-friendly sign-up tool in English and Spanish will become available, the Treasury Department and the White House announced Friday. The portal, GetCTC, is being created by Code for America, a nonprofit group that also built GetYourRefund.org to help people access the earned income tax credit and other tax benefits. Also, fewer than 15% of recipients who received payments by direct deposit in July will be mailed paper checks for the August installment due to a technical issue the IRS expects to resolve by the September distribution. Having an impact Parents reported less trouble affording food and household expenses after the first payment was sent on July 15, according to the latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, released Wednesday. RELATED: The child tax credit may be helping ease economic hardship after just one round Just over 10% of households with children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past seven days, according to the survey, which was conducted July 21 to August 2. That’s the lowest estimate since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and a «huge drop» of 3.5 percentage points from the prior survey, taken a month earlier, said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
