Not Everyone Cashed Their Dead Relative’s Stimulus Check In total, only 65,000 of the more than 160 million checks have been returned to the government. The remaining 5,000 were mostly returned on account of the users’ desire to help the government save money. Other charitably-minded Americans have donated their checks rather than returning them. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, had an undeniably chaotic rollout. Passed in the first weeks after the COVID-19 emergency began, the measure emphasized the quick distribution of money over security in who that money was sent to. Consequently, the information that the IRS used to determine who was eligible for which payments was Americans’ filed 2019 tax returns.