OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 1:48 PM PT — Thursday, June 25, 2020
New weekly jobless claims appear to be holding steady. The Labor Department reported 1.48 million Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits last week.
The number was higher than economists’ expectations for about 1.3 million new claims, while continuing claims fell by more than 760,000. The previous week’s data was revised up by 32,000.
The Commerce Department also released its final first quarter GDP revision, which confirmed the U.S. economy shrank at an annualized rate of 5% in the first three months of the year.
Meanwhile, more than a million deceased Americans were sent more than a billion dollars in total as part of the stimulus payments made earlier this year. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the IRS and Treasury Department rolled out more than 160 million payments worth around $269 billion.
Treasury officials explained in order to meet the mandate to deliver payments as quickly as possible, it used policies that didn’t include using death records from Social Security to halt those payments.
The report also noted the IRS doesn’t have a plan in place to notify ineligible recipients, including the relatives of the deceased Americans who received a payment.
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