Another Old Overpayment Story

     Another day, another story about Social Security trying to collect on an ancient overpayment. The claimant involved says he was told years ago that it had been taken care of but the computer says he owes $14,000 so Social Security is planning to just seize his benefits for the next year and a half to make it up. It's up to a very sick claimant to sort it out.

     Yes, I know he can ask for waiver -- possibly for the second time since the first waiver may have been lost -- but the claimant involved doesn't know which way to turn. Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on overpayment collections? How long is too long for the agency to wait to try to collect? And why do we have this run of stories about very old overpayments? Is Social Security using some new computer program to dredge up these old overpayments out of its records in order to please Congressional Republicans? Does this really please Congressional Republicans?

Was It What You Expected?

     FedSmith visits a Social Security field office.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Social Security Offices To Be Closed To Public On Friday

     Social Security has just announced via its Twitter feed that its offices will be closed to the public on Friday. I'm not aware of any prior announcement. In recent years, Social Security has completely closed its offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That wasn't done this year, probably because of the government shutdown in October.

Social Security Gets A/A For Plain Writing

     The Center for Plain Writing is giving the Social Security Administration a grade of A/A for plain writing, higher than any other agency. The first A is for following the requirements of the Plain Writing Act and the second A is for following its spirit.

Distilling The Right Wing's Frustration Over Social Security Into One Title

     Title of a blog post by Gary Galles of the Ludwig von Mises Institute: Killing The "We Paid Our Taxes; We Earned Our Benefits" Social Security Ponzi Meme.

Gotta Collect Those Overpayments

     From The Missoulian:

A Corvallis man was floored last week when he received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying he has to pay nearly $2,000 by Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, due to a clerical error nearly 40 years ago.

Rudolph Weiglein said he was notified by the SSA that the agency had overpaid him on a claim, and he needs to pay back $1,995 to the government.

“At first, I thought for sure somebody stole my ID or my Social Security number or something,” he explained. “Because I didn’t have any claims with Social Security. So I called them and it turns out it was from when my father died in 1965 and my mother received survivor benefits.”

Weiglein said he was 11 years old when his father passed away, and he didn’t have any recollection of getting survivor benefits.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I talked to a guy at the SSA and I said, ‘Is this a joke?’ And he said, ‘No, it stays with you.’ He didn’t break it down or nothing. I can’t believe they are trying to collect an overpayment from almost 40 years ago. I don’t have any records from back then.” ...

     If you think it is a good idea that there is no statute of limitations on Social Security overpayments, how do you expect Mr. Weiglein to defend himself, to argue that he wasn't overpaid 40 years ago? It's more than possible that there wasn't really an overpayment back then. If there was an overpayment, Social Security probably can't explain how it happened. Is it fair to seize a person's benefits today to collect a 40 year old overpayment when neither the Social Security Administration nor the claimant involved has any idea how the overpayment got recorded in Social Security's records so long ago?

Interim Assistance Reimbursement NPRM

     From a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making (NPRM) posted in the Federal Register today:

We reimburse States that provide interim assistance to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claimants under our interim assistance reimbursement (IAR) program. We provide this reimbursement from the SSI recipient's initial retroactive SSI payment. On November 20, 2010, we began using an electronic Interim Assistance Reimbursement system (eIAR) to streamline the way we process reimbursements to the States. The eIAR process replaced our prior paper-based process with an electronic one, and greatly reduced our and the State's involvement in manually processing IAR cases. This electronic system did not change the amount of payments we make to States and SSI recipients. We propose to revise our rules about how we administer the IAR process to reflect the electronic process. We also made minor language changes and reorganized the sections for clarity.