From the San Mateo Daily Journal:
Jose Alvaro Munevar, 55, was laid up in the hospital recovering from knee surgery when notified that his Supplemental Security Disability Insurance payments were suspended.
His payments were cut off because he bounced a $300 check in Las Vegas back in 2007, a felony in Nevada. ...
Munevar had overdrawn his account by only $15, a mistake that would ultimately cost the man several months of income and a little pride. ...
Munevar tried to clear up the warrant with Clark County, Nev. prosecutors but was unable to do it on his own. ...
[His case along with other cases] quickly turned into a class-action lawsuit as it became clear Social Security was wrongfully withholding payments from more than just a few people.
In fact, it wrongfully withheld payments from more than 200,000 people and owes about $700 million in back payments. ...
[Munevar's attorney] was able to get the Clark County arrest warrant “quashed” and Social Security paid Munevar $14,000 in back payments and restored his benefits.
That is certainly one, heartwarming, version of the story. But there are an awful lot of them like this: XXX committed a crime, and a warrant was issued for his arrest for incest with a minor. SSA suspended his SSI benefits due to the active warrant. XXX was arrested and his benefits terminated while he was incarcerated. Due to the class action law suit, SSA has reopened his case, and is now paying him for the time when he was merely wanted for the crime.
ReplyDeleteThat is a true story, and there are many others in which the warrants were for burglary, aggravated assault, and countless other violent crimes. Those people get checks as a result of the class action lawsuit, too.
And the field office personnel who are spending hours processing these cases are not doing anything to reduce the backlog.
The vast majority of cases Like this that I have seen over the past several years are just as innocuous. There are very few actual hardened criminals receiving benefits while on the lam from John Law.
ReplyDeleteOnce again a program that was not well thought out, considering that the felons were not even able to get the warrant cleared or the arresting agency did not want to come to another state to pick them up. I had so many like that where the issuing agency wouldn't clear the warrant up. Just another example of why I will be happy to leave when I can get my early out! This and the fact that I work in an office with zero adjudication hours allotted per month. Pure torture is what it is these days working in the SSI Unit.
ReplyDeleteA lot of jurisdictions were using this as a moneymaking venture to collect old court fees they had no other way to get, sort of a "found money" situation. And OIG, who was supposed to be checking the validity of the warrants, made things worse. Instead of doing what they were supposed to do, all the OIG agents did was verify the warrant was still active without verifying the crime at issue was a felony.
ReplyDeleteThe actual parole/probation violators weren't affected by teh settlement. They stayed suspended and are still suspended.
What demonstrates the idiocy of the SSA is the fact that they have paid huge sums to people who had already been paid the money for the suspension period, resulting in huge overpayments.
Congress should simply have given law enforcement the ability to run warrant matches against SSA records, with all hits turned over to the agency issuing the warrant. That way, it would have been up to the law enforcement agency that issued the warrant to pursue extradition instead of what was basically a "self extradition" process under the implemented SSA interpretation.
ReplyDelete