The first IRS child benefit payments went out today. Under the new scheme, parents are eligible for $300 per month for every child below the age of six, and $250 per month for every child aged six and above. The payments phase out for single parents with incomes above $112,500 per year and married parents with incomes above $150,000 per year.

The People’s Policy Project has spent most of this year focused on this benefit and specifically on whether the IRS is going to be able to successfully reach the approximately seven million kids that are eligible but not already registered with the IRS (I, II, III, IV). In the Washington Post today, we finally got some telling numbers on this question and they are not good: only 720,000 kids are successfully receiving the new Child Tax Credit (CTC) because they signed for one of the three stimulus payments over the last year. This suggests that 90 percent or more of the (mostly very poor) kids the IRS needed to reach through its much-maligned non-filer portal have not in fact been reached.

A lesser problem with the program, which we also highlighted in the run-up to the passage of the program in March, was covered at the Wall Street Journal today. The problem is that many parents will end up receiving overpayments that will be clawed back at the end of the year via a surprise tax bill. This will happen to parents whose income was below the income phaseout thresholds last year but rises above those thresholds this year. The surprise bills have not happened yet, but they are coming.