From Myinforms, whatever that is:
After three years of complaints and pressure from taxpayers, the federal government will stop seizing the tax refunds of Americans whose long-dead parents had incurred debts to Social Security many years earlier.
In an emergency message to its staff late Friday, the Treasury Department announced that it will immediately stop confiscating money from hundreds of thousands of people whose forebears had been overpaid by Social Security decades earlier.
The change, which applied only to debts from 2002 or earlier, follows Washington Post articles that chronicled the impact of the seizures on taxpayers who never knew that their parents had had debts to the government....
Apparently, there was an article about this in the Washington Post but it's behind a paywall.
The fact that this ever happened is a sign of just how bizarre things got after the GOP took over the House of Representatives. Overpayments, which were usually due to either mistakes that the Social Security Administration made or honest errors by claimants, were always conflated with fraud. The insistent demand from Congress was to do anything, literally anything, to collect these overpayments. Nothing was too extreme. Forty year old overpayments? Go all out to collect them. Don't worry about the fact that the agency lacks proof that an overpayment actually occurred decades ago. The person who was overpaid is dead? Just collect it from any relative of the person who was overpaid.
1 comment:
Some of those were the claimant's fault. Social Security doesn't garnish paychecks, etc like the IRS so there only game is getting it back on a tax refund or when the person files for disability or retirement and taking it out of his or her check then. Better late than never when a debt is owed.
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