Economic Impact Payment and paper filing

[mtbc]

Our US taxes are complex enough, including attaching documents issued by Her Majesty's Government, that I still file taxes on paper. Yesterday we received our Economic Impact Payment which is testament to the Royal Mail because of how our mailing address is mangled on the check. For example, one issue is that what was typed as mixed-case Kinross on 2018 Form 1040 Schedule 6 became KIN 2088 (they will not yet have processed our 2019 return). Modern OCR is even good at handwriting so why does the IRS have such trouble with clear typing onto a white background? I am thus most curious about how well they manage to read the actual numbers, the amounts of money, from the forms, especially as I use Liberation Mono whose zeroes have a small central dot to better distinguish them from the letter O.

The check is of no immediate use to us anyway: it is made out in joint names and the UK does not routinely allow signing over a check, we are under lockdown and we have no joint account at a bank that accepts US Treasury checks. Presumably because of the address mangling, I could never get my details to match the IRS' records when attempting to provide direct deposit information instead.

Comments

[emperor]

I would expect a cheque made out to Alice & Bob Smith to be accepted by the bank that has Alice or Bob's account, to be honest.

[mtbc]

Alas, no, not since the a/c payee approach became default, they became really strict on matching the account name to how the cheque was made out instead of allowing signing them over as we could in our distant youth.

[mtbc]

(Though the converse is okay: paying an individual cheque into a joint account.)