Stop us if you’ve heard this before: The rollout of a major piece of the government’s big coronavirus relief package is off to a bumpy beginning.
Some consumers who use popular tax-prep services (like H&R Block and TurboTax) said they didn’t get their $1.2k stimulus checks when they were expecting them.
Others said their payments ended up in the wrong bank accounts. (Spare a thought for the soul who manages the IRS Twitter account, ‘cuz the 🔥 in those mentions is HOT.)
If you’re still waiting for your money to arrive, the IRS says don’t freak out. And America’s fintech firms say they want to help.
There’s just one thing you need to do…
… mosey over to, uh, the website where it’s literally raining coins with $$ for eyes.
It was set up by Jack Dorsey’s Square, which is encouraging people to download its Cash app for easy payment. It’s one of several fintech companies rolling out the red carpet for users who want their money.
This month, the digital banking startup Chime tried giving 1k of its users their stimulus-check money in advance, through a feature called SpotMe. The optional service lets qualifying users overdraw their accounts for free.
Chris Britt, Chime’s CEO, told Business Insider that users wanted some, but not all, of their money early. By Monday, it had distributed $1B+ in payments to 600k+ customers.
It sounds swell, but some people have questions
Intuit (TurboTax’s parent company) launched a site that lets people calculate what they’ll get. ProPublica reported that people who used the site’s free stimulus-registration tool were bombarded with marketing emails pushing paid products.
“As soon as we learned these emails were inadvertently going to people who created accounts solely for the stimulus registration product, we stopped the emails from being automatically sent,” a company spokesman told The Washington Post.
