Federal stimulus payments may have been critical to helping many taxpayers make it through the first year of COVID, but they also were a huge source of errors on tax returns.
In the year to Dec. 31, 2020, almost 88% of all errors on individual income tax returns involved the Recovery Rebate Credit, according to most recent IRS data available. They accounted for a total of 11.3 million mistakes; for comparison, the next five most common errors combined account for just over 1.2 million mistakes.
The massive number of RRC errors dwarfed the more common mistakes; for instance, errors involving adjusted gross income amounts accounted for 33% of all mistakes in 2019, but only 2.2% in 2020.
Scroll through to see the top math errors on individual returns, and how they changed during the first year of COVID.
