@Flamikep wrote:
I'm looking for answers from the company I purchased a service from.
You paid for tax preparation, you didn't pay for financial management services to cover emergency disaster stimulus payments.
Look, let me get a bit legalistic, ok? In order to receive your refund on a Turbo brand debit card, or pay your fees from your refund, or both, you must make a number of specific legal agreements (contracts) between yourself, the IRS, Turbotax and the processing company SBTPG.
- You give the IRS permission to deposit your refund into a bank account that is in your name, but not under your control (the temporary account opened for you by SBTPG).
- You give SBTPG permission to open a bank account in your name (which in some cases requires filing paperwork with the government under the Patriot Act).
- You give SBTPG permission to deduct any fees, and transfer your money to the Turbo card.
- Then you give SBTPG permission to close the temporary account (which in some cases requires filing paperwork with the government under the Patriot Act).
- You give Intuit permission to forward certain personally identifying information (that is normally protected by taxpayer privacy laws) to SBTPG to make all this happen; such as your name, address, SSN, and amount of refund.
All of these permissions are applicable to the tax return you filed this year only. They don't carry over to future tax years, and they certainly don't carry over to emergency government payments that were not even imagined when the contracts and permissions were asked for.
So the bottom line is that, while is would be technically easy to repeat the process for the stimulus payments, it may be illegal. You never gave the IRS permission to send a stimulus payment to SBTPG in your name, and you never gave SBTPG permission to open a temporary account, receive the money, transfer it, and close the account.
Suppose the IRS decides to waive all the regulations and privacy laws and says "everyone gets their stimulus by the same method they got their refund."
- What if some taxpayers want a check and not a money card? How do they opt out?
- What about people who have lost their money cards, or changed their address since getting their tax refunds?
- How does SBTPG get compensated for providing this service? They have a contract with Intuit regarding refunds, but who will pay them over the stimulus? Or should their employees work for free for the sake of the emergency?
Or suppose the IRS says, "if you want your stimulus on the same money card as your refund, go to this web site and click "I accept" to the new terms of service." That web site could not possibly exist at this point since no one predicted it would be needed.
I'm not saying it can't or won't happen. Maybe it will. I'm saying that it may be unreasonable to expect these complicated issues to all be worked out less than 2 business days after the stimulus law was signed. And if the IRS decides not to involve SBTPG and the tax preparers (perhaps due to the privacy laws I mentioned above) there is nothing Intuit can do about it.
