Four
years after her longtime partner died of kidney cancer, federal agents
knocked on Gail Deckman’s door outside Chicago and told her she was in
trouble: She had kept thousands of dollars in Social Security disability
benefits that should have stopped when he died.
Deckman
told the agents she thought the $1,400 check deposited each month into
an account to which she had access was a payment for land her partner
had sold in Michigan. She spent the money on rent and clothes and gifts
for her grandchildren, she said.
The
inspector general’s office, which investigates disability fraud and
tries to recoup money for the government, ultimately charged her
$119,392 — nearly three times what she received in error.
Deckman didn’t have the money. So the Social Security Administration garnished the entire $704 check she was going to receive
every month when she retired from her minimum-wage job flipping burgers
at the convenience store in her local Rebel gas station. She can apply
for retirement in 2032 — when she’s 83. ...
The inflated fees were set in motion during the Trump administration,
when attorneys in charge of a little-known anti-fraud program run by the
inspector general’s office levied unprecedented fines against Deckman
and more than 100 other beneficiaries without due process, according to
interviews, documents and sworn testimony before an administrative law
judge. In doing so, they disregarded regulations and deviated from how
the program had recovered money since its inception in 1995, failing to
take into account someone’s financial state, their age, their intentions
and level of remorse, among other factors. ...
The escalating penalties created a
giant jump — at least on paper — in the amount of money the inspector
general could show lawmakers it was bringing in, according to interviews
and sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Post. Fines as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars were imposed on poor, disabled and elderly people, many of whom had no hope of ever being able to pay.
A Chicago woman was fined $132,000 after wrongly receiving as much as $10,618 in benefits, according to internal data of penalties and assessments obtained
by The Post. A Denver woman was sanctioned $168,000 after cashing as
much as $14,960 in wrongly received checks. A New Jersey woman is on the
hook for nearly $435,000 after she accepted about $47,000 in benefits
but failed to report a $120,000 house she inherited from her father and
car loans she co-signed for her children, on what she said was a
lawyer’s advice. ...
The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the Office of Inspector
General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation,
according to a ruling this month by the administrative judge at the
Merit Systems Protection Board. ...
