Are you a parent in North Carolina? You may be missing out on $335 in COVID relief.
Parents in North Carolina who didn’t already receive a $335 check to help offset the costs of remote learning for their kids still have time to apply for the money.
The checks are part of the 2020 CARES Act coronavirus relief packages. The federal government originally gave North Carolina around $440 million for it, but the state wasn’t able to spend all of it.
Part of the complication was that some parents were automatically sent the money but others weren’t. Many of the people who didn’t automatically get the money are low-income families, who now have to fill out an application for it.
The deadline to apply is May 31. People are eligible if they had a child under the age of 16 in 2019 and lived in North Carolina. Go to www.ncdor.gov/extracredit to apply for the $335 checks.
People who claimed a child dependent on their taxes in 2019 should have already gotten the money. But for those who didn’t make enough to file taxes — or who haven’t gotten the money even though they did — an application is necessary to get the money.
The deadline to apply was initially the end of 2020, but the N.C. General Assembly unanimously passed a bill that Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law, extending the deadline to May 31.
“It’s only fair to give them the opportunity to apply for it,” Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican and a top state budget writer, told The News & Observer previously.
State auditor’s report
State Auditor Beth Wood’s office released a report Tuesday detailing how the state has spent the money from last year’s CARES Act. The federal government sent North Carolina $3.6 billion in that relief package, and Wood found that by the end of 2020, state officials had spent around 94% of the money.
“As a result of Governor Cooper’s and the North Carolina General Assembly’s leadership, North Carolina is recovering from this pandemic,” said Charlie Perusse, the director of the Office of State Budget and Management, in the audit.
Of the other 6% of the money, some has been spent in early 2021, some has been returned to the federal government, and some is still waiting to be spent. For the $335 checks for parents specifically, Wood’s audit found, there’s about $62 million that the state would send back to the federal government if parents don’t apply for it by the end of May.
That’s enough money for 185,000 families to apply, if they haven’t already received the checks.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Megaphone or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published April 2, 2021 at 3:31 PM.
