Tax Season 2023: Roughly 112,000 Massachusetts residents will have to use their refunds to pay unemployment overpayments
Asher Notheis
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Hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents might owe the state if they received overpayments in unemployment benefits over the last few years, bringing down the value of their tax refund this year.
The overpayments were issued at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when there was much confusion over who qualified for unemployment benefits. In the wake of these overpayments, Massachusetts’s Department of Unemployment Assistance is now trying to get $719 million back from taxpayers, who will help return this money with their tax refunds from filing taxes this year, according to GBH.
“There has been tremendous outreach that has been done to date, especially through a campaign last year, to reach as many claimants as possible,” said Lauren Jones, Massachusetts’s secretary of labor.
A total of 112,000 Massachusetts residents owe money in unemployment overpayments, and on average, all of them owe $6,400 to the federal and state government.
Of the 112,000 tax refunds that will be intercepted, the taxpayers who they are for have been contacted several times by the department. It is not yet known how much the state will get back with the refunds, according to Jones.
“Every case is really going to be looked at on a case-by-case basis,” Jones said. “And we also don’t know how much of a refund people would be eligible to receive.”
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Beyond these 112,000 residents, there are another 59,000 residents who, in total, owe approximately $370 million. These people stand out from the 112,000 residents because they had qualified for an overpayment waiver but failed to claim it.
Massachusetts is conducting more outreach to determine repayment plans, so these 59,000 residents will not have any money taken from their tax refunds.