Report: Stimulus checks may be delayed over order to have Trump's name printed on them

The Internal Revenue Service's information technology team learned early on Tuesday that President Trump's name must appear on the stimulus checks being sent to millions of Americans, an order that will likely lead to a delay in issuing the first batch of payments, three senior IRS officials told The Washington Post.

This will be the first time a president's name appears on an IRS disbursement, the Post reports. The plan went into motion a few weeks ago, the officials said, after Trump privately mentioned to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that he should be allowed to formally sign the checks. Presidents, however, are not authorized signers for U.S. Treasury disbursements, and the checks are signed by civil servants to show the payment is nonpartisan. To make up for this, the Post reports, Trump's name will be written on the check's memo line, under the words "Economic Impact Payment."

The IRS's information technology team is working from home, and to get Trump's name on the checks, they must change the computer code and then run tests to make sure it works. Chad Hooper, a quality control manager who is also president of the IRS's Professional Managers Association, told the Post that "any last minute request like this will create a downstream snarl that will result in a delay." A Treasury Department representative pushed back, saying the checks are "scheduled to go out on time and exactly as planned — there is absolutely no delay whatsoever."

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The checks are part of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief stimulus package passed by Congress last month, and are supposed to be sent on Thursday to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, where they will be printed and issued. They will be mailed to people whose banking information is not on file with the IRS, at a rate of five million every week through September.