Puerto Rico Treasury starts cutting $1,200 checks to 2018 tax return filers
The Puerto Rico Treasury Department has begun the second phase of the Economic Impact plan, which calls for sending $1,200 to taxpayers who filed their 2018 returns.
Those deposits follow the disbursements to taxpayers who filed their returns for 2019, and provided their banking information to the agency.
On Tuesday, the agency disbursed nearly $48 million to 33,183 taxpayers. Payments were also sent to 99,270 taxpayers who filed the 2019 return, for $157.3 million. In total, the government has disbursed $205.1 million to 132,453 taxpayers.
Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés said returns for tax year 2018 were filed under the agency’s old system, so the process required further analysis of the data, in addition to retrieving the information and migrating it to the Uniform Internal Revenue System (SURI, in Spanish), which is the new platform.
“These first automatic payments correspond to the tax returns that we were able to validate internally in our systems to ensure that the information was accurate to make the deposits,” he said.
“As it happened with a group of taxpayers in the first phase of this program, we will soon enable the link for those taxpayers who filed the 2018 return to enter their bank account information. Following the governor’s instructions, these deposits must reach citizens as soon as possible,” he said, noting that providing the bank information does not require a SURI account.
At the end of the month, Treasury will provide further instructions so that non-filers can receive their payments in a third phase of the distribution plan, Parés said.
