Steve Caseley couldn't believe what showed up in the mail last week. Was it some kind of joke?
No, the letter to Lisa Moser arrived on official Social Security Administration stationery. Moser - who has Down syndrome and lives with Caseley and his wife, who is Moser's sister, in West Des Moines - owed the government $4,425.40.
"Due to incorrect computation for the period of November 1987 through June 2010," the letter said, Moser received $183,227.55 in disability insurance benefits when she should have received $178,802.15. ...
Privacy laws prohibit Social Security officials from discussing specific situations, but communications director John Garlinger did speak in general terms.
Could the source of the problem be the wages Moser earned from Panera and Wendy's? It's possible.
"Part of the definition of disabled means you can't work," Garlinger said. "If we say someone has been overpaid because they were earning too much money, they need to gather up their income tax records and bring them in. We'll go through that. It's not impossible we missed something. It's not impossible, for whatever reason, not all the income was reported."
That link in the article --it goes to a PDF of the overpayment notice, with the Social Security number plainly visible. Real smart, Des Moines Register.
4 comments:
with help like that ...who needs enemies....23 years, huh? IRS requires what 7 years of back records?
The newspaper screwed up, as well.
But overpayments are easy to appeal and then forgotten by both SS and Medicare, but the average recipient gets the heck scared out of them.
"Part of the definition of disabled means you can't work," Garlinger said.
It's my opinion,social security is inconsistent with the definition. When an alj implies a claimant is not incapacitated by using adl's to deny a person but then award benefits to another person who eventually work part-time or less than gainful.
It's unlikely that it's due to work activity. Since it's Title II, work either results in a total suspension or termination of benefits or it has no affect on benefits at all. If it had been an SGA cessation, it is unlikely SSA would have used the phrase "incorrect computation."
Indirectly it could be due to work in the sense that SSA recomputed the PIA using the wrong amount of earnings (e.g., earnings of $10000.00 are entered as $100,000 in the recomp).
The newspaper seems to have wisely now removed the letter from their website.
I also wonder whether downward adjustment of the benefit might be limited by administrative finality? SSA never pays any attention to the administrative finality rules in assessing overpayments, and the OIG has slapped them down over that issue in the past.
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