From CBS Chicago:
Days after a suburban man’s mother died, he noticed large withdrawals from her bank account.
Tim Carlberg feels beaten down by his almost four month battle with the Social Security Administration.
Less than ten days after his 89-year-old mother died in August, someone from the social security office electronically swooped in and withdrew five payments from her bank account. The problem is, they were only supposed to take back one payment, from the month she died. ...
Instead, social security withdrew $7,028 more than owed. They did it all within three days.
Carlberg says he noticed the withdrawals almost immediately and called social security. An employee acknowledged the wrong date of death had been recorded. ...
“I thought everything was taken care of the first time I talked to somebody, but here we are three months later,” Carlberg said.
Dozens of phone calls, hours of headaches and several form submissions later, Carlberg still has no refund.
“We can’t get any answers. That’s the biggest frustration. Nobody seems to know, and then they don’t let you talk to anybody to get the answers. And then it changes,” Carlberg said. ...
Ah, the other side of the overpayment dilemma. The underpayment (oxymoron of a phrase if there ever was one) dilemma. Guess which ones take longer to get resolved. With overpayments, the claimant will get a demand letter immediately to the tune of "you owe us $1 million, please remit within 10 days". With the underpayments, its "we have to investigate". Please don't make the argument that lack of staffing is the problem not mismanagement. Lack of staffing IS mismanagement. Really, someone needs to push for a congressional hearing on overpayments/underpayments.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest problem with SSA is that while the system is designed to put the public in front of someone there to help them, it's also designed to help only the most common of problems.
ReplyDeleteWith long-reaching, unique problems like this that require massive follow-up and tenacity on the part of the SSA employee, the story usually goes one way. The person deals with rep after rep (usually a bunch of fruitless calls to the teleservice center, who in their defense are NOT set up to help with complex issues) until they meet one that takes a personal stake in the case and pursues it.
Even then, it relies on that employee also being an experienced enough troubleshooter and conversant enough in our tangled bureaucracy to get something done. I would literally advise people that if they have an issue like this, give SSA two chances to fix it and then go Congressional.
And this isn't really that complicated! The lady's date of death is clear and notated on an official death certificate; it was obviously put into the system with the wrong month.
ReplyDeleteNow imagine getting an underpayment fixed when it deals with WEP or GPO, a worker's comp offset (especially with a settlement), a totalization agreement with a foreign country, the question of whether a SNT or prepaid burial plan was properly set up to be excluded from resources for SSI, PIA recalculations when there's work after disability onset, or converting from disability on your own record to retirement or survivor's on your spouse's (with the latter, add in a DAC and a young child in care and figure out the family maximum). Now add in a situation where the person's concurrent for SSI and Title II so an overpayment in one is created from an underpayment in the other...
Getting someone at SSA smart enough to understand the rules is hard enough. Getting such a person to sit down and actually look at a case (which often has been going on for years by the time SSA or the beneficiary figures out there's an underpayment) for the hours it might take to untangle it is even harder.
File a fraud claim with the IG- it’ll be fixed within a week.
ReplyDelete9:11 PM. If this stuff is this complicated, Congress needs to streamline the rules/computer inputs in order to make it easier and thus cheaper to administrate. If your making significant overpayments to someone who can't pay it back, that is money that is gone. Even when you can recover some, doesn't it often just effect other government funding? You take away some income, SNAP, rent subsidies and Medicaid become more available... Only Congressional stubbornness keeps these things from being easier to fix. So, don't expect anything to change! You would think Congress would insist on making insider theft at government agencies much tougher to get away with, too. Then again, Congress is, well, Congress!
ReplyDeleteIt took over a year to get back some money that Social Security took out of my check for Medicare, that they were not suppose to. With calls writing letters, you name it. I have found out through the years if you call the 800 number you will get all kinds of answers. The way I do it is call 3 times and if you get the same answer on two of them, that's the one you go with. The sad thing is SS should train they people a little better than they do.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is no one takes ownership or is responsible for correcting the mistake. The first person you talk to thinks they have loved the problem by sending a message to the payment center. They have no way of knowing, unless they diary it and persist, of ever knowing if the problem gets fixed.
ReplyDeleteWhen it is sent to the payment center, it is not clear who, if anyone, is responsible for the correction. If you speak to a module or branch manager, they will tell you they gave it to a benefit authorizer. If you ask who made the mistake in the first place and have they been instructed on what they did wrong or that they must fix it right away, they reply that this is not how they work.
When nothing gets fixed, and you call/message/email/fax or whatever again you either receive no reply or are told they will look into it and again nothing gets done.
For years, the Appeals Council had a trouble shooter, Terry Jensen (Terry you have no idea how much you are missed) who would take responsibility to correct problems and tell you about the progress in doing so. There should be a dozen Terry Jensens in every payment center and in Baltimore and in every Regional Commissioners' and even in the Commissioner's Office..
To be sure there are staffing issues and computer problems and audit trails that limit a person's ability to make changes without oversight (See the story on the transfer of funds to improper accounts above) but the real problem is a combination of not my job and incompetent/indifferent management and no accountability for anyone who screws up.