As of this morning, the first of six advance Child Tax Credit payments are being sent out by the Internal Revenue Service. Roughly 36 million American families, altogether containing nine in ten American children, can expect to receive the payments in the coming weeks.

The payments were made possible by the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act, the first significant piece of legislation passed in the forty-sixth president’s term. The American Rescue Plan Act contains hundreds of provisions, most notably including the $1400 stimulus checks received in the spring. As an extra aid measure to families, it arranged for half of the Child Tax Credit payments to be sent out as advance payments, rather than simply allowing the deduction to be claimed on families’ 2021 income taxes in April 2022.

The March legislation also increased the level of the credit – from $2000 per child per year to $3000 for children six and older and $3600 for those under six – and allowed for it to be fully refundable, meaning that families could receive the deduction even if they would not normally pay income tax.

Over the next six months, five more payments will be received; each payment is slated to be sent out on the 15th day of the month, although this date will shift for holidays and weekends. For households that register with direct deposit, the money should arrive very quickly, within a few days; for those who opt to receive paper checks, the default, the delivery could take weeks.

An area of concern is that, because the payments are sent out according to families’ income tax returns – and poor families tend to pay no income tax, restricting their ability to receive the checks – many eligible families will not be able to claim it. While the IRS tried to spread awareness of the program by sending out letters to eligible families earlier in the year, informing them that a credit was on the way, these letters would not have come to families that were not in the IRS’s system. In any case, the letters do not seem to have worked; a recent Data for Progress survey revealed that more than half of eligible Americans did not know they were scheduled to receive the credit.

In response to this problem, the IRS has set up a portal on its website, allowing families that do not normally file their income taxes to register for the credit. However, it remains uncertain how many families have actually done this.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for The National Interest.

Image: Reuters