Ineligible foreign workers have reportedly been receiving coronavirus relief checks from the IRS.
Thousands of nonresident workers have received stimulus checks from the government and don’t know how to return them, according to Fox Business.
The noneligible recipients are often college-age workers who spent time in the United States over the past two years and filed the wrong income tax forms in 2018 or 2019. Many of those who received the money in error have been surprised to find it in their accounts and are spending the money or holding it because there is no clear guidance on how they should return it.
“Even if they try to send it back, it’s so difficult that they may just end up keeping it,” Donna Kepley, president of international tax consulting firm Arctic International, told Fox Business.
Several of the students who received money told Politico they wanted to return the money due to fear of being charged or deported but weren’t able to figure out how to do so.
“We were contacted by a lot of our clients all of a sudden, on the one day when they started hitting their accounts or that the checks started going out, asking what to do,” Kepley said. “And so we had to try to figure out how to return it, which is not easy.”
Kepley added that the payments were most likely distributed to thousands of foreign workers in April and she had spoken with dozens of clients over the past two weeks noticing that the error appears to stem from students on F-1 student and J-1 exchange visas.
There were more than a million foreign students in the U.S. last year, according to the Institute of International education, and nearly 400,000 people received J-1 temporary visas.
