The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) says that thousands of millionaires claimed unemployment benefits amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The list of millionaires includes 19,000 who made at least $1 million, 4,500 who earned between $5 million and $10 million, and 229 who had eight-figure incomes or more. The figures released by the IRS showed that millionaires received an average of $13,900 in unemployment benefits.
Millionaires Receive Unemployment Benefits
Experts said that there were a number of reasons for the incident, including expanded benefits that Congress approved in an attempt to prevent an economic collapse due to widespread layoffs and business shutdowns.
A senior researcher of social insurance at the National Employment Law Project, Amy M. Traub, said that tens of millions of workers were forced out of their livelihoods in 2020, which included a wide range of individuals, such as people who had really good incomes.
The IRS' data were included in a collection of figures released by the agency, though the department does not say how many people made enough money to put them in the top 1% of incomes, which was $591,000 in 2020, while collecting unemployment aid in the same year, as per Politico.
Experts speculated that some of the people who received aid had more typical earnings but were married to highly-paid individuals with whom they filed their taxes jointly. The incident may also be a result of small business owners who became eligible for assistance for the first time in that year.
A former top Biden administration tax official, Mark Mazur, said that a lot of establishments were forced to shut down at the time. He noted that people were told they should file for unemployment, which they followed, as many states generally made the process much easier.
According to Yahoo Finance, despite the issue, the majority of unemployment benefits still went to people who earned less than $100,000 per year. The aid paid to those who earned at least $1 million or more totaled $264 million in 2020, which was less than 1% of the $405 billion total that was paid out.
Eligible Individuals
In the early months of the pandemic, unemployment rates skyrocketed amid stay-at-home orders and overnight businesses shutting down. The jobless rate then more than quadrupled to 14.7% in April 2020.
Congress ordered the expansion of unemployment benefits to increase how much money people received, how long they could be eligible to receive it, and who qualified for the aid program. The wider range of eligible people later included self-employed, independent contractors, gig workers, and others.
The situation comes as state attorneys argued that a class-action lawsuit against the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency involving pandemic benefits should be dismissed. The lawsuit was a result of five people suing the agency, arguing that it froze payments for thousands of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic while failing to provide a way to appeal.
The lawsuit also alleges that workers were then left "without a lifeline" and were forced to face "financially dire situations" as the state unemployment hit nearly 23% in April of 2020, MLive reported.
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