Millionaires received an average of $13,900 in benefits, according to the figures. | Elise Amendola/AP Photo
By Brian Faler
11/22/2022 11:27 AM EST
Some of the nation’s wealthiest people were among the tens of millions of Americans who received unemployment checks in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
More than 19,000 people who made at least $1 million in 2020 also collected jobless assistance that year, new IRS data show. That included 4,500 people who earned between $5 million and $10 million and 229 people with eight-figure incomes or more.
Millionaires received an average of $13,900 in benefits, according to the figures.
Experts cited a number of reasons for the seeming anomaly, including expanded benefits approved by Congress to fend off an economic collapse amid widespread layoffs and business shutdowns.
“Tens of millions of workers were thrown out of their jobs in 2020 and it was a really wide range of people — it included people who had been making really good incomes,” said Amy M. Traub, senior researcher of social insurance at the National Employment Law Project.
It’s a small, though surprising, share of the nearly 30 million tax returns that reported receiving unemployment aid that year.
The figures were included in a trove of data released by the IRS, though the department doesn’t say how people made enough money to put them in the top 1 percent of incomes — $591,000 in 2020 — while collecting unemployment aid in the same year.
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