Donald Trump’s Name Will Appear on Millions of US Stimulus Checks

Published in Morocco World News on April 15, 2020:

Washington, D.C. - The US Treasury Department has ordered that President Donald Trump’s name appear on stimulus checks sent to tens of millions of Americans, which will likely slow the delivery of the COVID-19 relief checks by several days.   

Critics of this decision argue it is a political maneuver to connect Trump and the stimulus checks, as this will be the first time that the name of a president has shown up on an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) expenditure. 

Each check will be worth $1,200 for individuals, $2,400 for married couples, with an additional $500 for each dependent child younger than 17 years old. The checks are part of an effort to aid the American economy, which has been damaged by the coronavirus.

These checks make up the $2.3 trillion package that Trump ordered last month. 

The Washington Post, citing White House officials, said that the checks will bear Trump’s name in the memo line, below a line that reads “Economic Impact Payment.”

The US Treasury Department communicated the decision to the IRS on April 14. 

IRS employees must implement the programming change from home. The move will likely lead to a delay in issuing the first batch of paper checks, as it requires the tweaking of the code in the IRS’s computers. 

“Any last minute request like this will create a downstream snarl that will result in a delay,” Chad Hooper, a quality control manager who is the national president of the IRS’s Professional Managers Association, told the Washington Post.

However, a representative of the US Treasury Department denied that adding Trump’s name to the stimulus checks would delay their distribution.

“Economic Impact Payment checks are scheduled to go out on time and exactly as planned-- there is absolutely no delay whatsoever,” said the representative in a statement to the Washington Post.