Posted on 04/11/2014 12:33:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When I say “debts,” I don’t mean loans that the parents willingly sought from SSA. It would be bad enough to hold a kid responsible for that (since when are children responsible for their parents’ obligations?), but at least it would have been voluntarily incurred by mom/dad. The “debts” here are overpayments of Social Security benefits, the product of SSA’s own errors. The parents who received them might not have even realized they were getting money they weren’t supposed to have. And now, somehow, it’s junior’s problem.
But wait. It gets worse.
When [Mary] Grice was 4, back in 1960, her father died, leaving her mother with five children to raise. Until the kids turned 18, Sadie Grice got survivor benefits from Social Security to help feed and clothe them.
Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. Why the feds chose to take Mary’s money, rather than her surviving siblings’, is a mystery…
“It was a shock,” said Grice, 58. “What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can’t prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus.”…
Social Security officials told Grice that six people — Grice, her four siblings and her father’s first wife, whom she never knew — had received benefits under her father’s account. The government doesn’t look into exactly who got the overpayment; the policy is to seek compensation from the oldest sibling and work down through the family until the debt is paid.
SSA insists that they did send notice — to a P.O. Box that Grice hasn’t owned for 35 years, even though they have her current address.
How can they demand restitution for a mistaken payment made in the late 1970s, let alone from someone who didn’t even receive it? Because: The farm bill that passed in 2011 lifted the 10-year statute of limitations on debts owed to the feds. Treasury has collected more than $400 million since then on very old obligations, many of them below the radar of public scrutiny because the amounts are often small enough, i.e. a few hundred dollars, that the targets find it’s cheaper to pay up than to fight. It’s a shakedown, based on the flawed assumption that a child not only must have benefited from the overpayment to his parent but that he/she received the entirety of the benefit, with little proof offered that the debt even exists. (One man who was forced to pay demanded a receipt from SSA affirming that his balance was now zero. The SSA clerk told him he’d put in the request but that the man shouldn’t expect to receive anything.) The only reason you’re hearing about Grice’s case, I think, is because they went after her for thousands, not hundreds, of dollars, which was enough of a hit to make her get a lawyer. Turns out that the feds had seized and then continued to hold her federal and state refunds, an amount greater than $4,400 — even though they were only demanding $2,996 from her to pay off her father’s debt. Lo and behold, once WaPo found out and started asking questions, the $1,400 excess was promptly returned to her. Amazing how fast bureaucracy can move when someone looks behind the curtain.
The whole thing is Kafkaesque — opaque, oppressive, arbitrary, and sinister in its indifference to making sure the right person pays so long as someone does. After reading the story, it’s not obvious to me what’s stopping Treasury from demanding a payment from every taxpayer whose parents are dead. If the chief witnesses are gone and the feds don’t have to prove that a child actually received any benefits from overpayment, the only “check” on this process is SSA’s willingness to tell the truth about who owes them money and how much. You trust them, don’t you?
Exit question from Karl: Isn’t holding children responsible for their parents’ retirement debts the governing model of the Democratic Party?
well THIS is certainly going to go down well for the Democrats with an election coming up.
Many people over pay their taxes, so they get a refund at the end of the year. They should realize that they’re putting that money at risk. Refunds can also be seized under Obamacare, if I’m not mistaken.
In other words everyone is a criminal except the REAL criminals, right?
How ironic, they are making the children responsible for the parents actions in this case but if an illegal is brought to this country at a young age they are victims of their parents actions and should not be “punished”.
I guess you can have it both ways...and more no doubt.
They are going to start deducting the amount “owed” from taxes already withheld. If you are getting no refund, then they will just ask you to pay your remaining tax debt. They excel at collecting taxes due.
No way out.
The new owebamacare expanded Medicaid is also designed to unknowingly rip people off.
Hidden in the law was a clause that the feds are entitled to any property owned by someone on Medicaid when they die.
If Grandma has no money and gets Medicaid, but owns a $200,000 house, when she dies the government scoops it up. Sorry kids, that will is meaningless now.
The state would do better to go after welfare and Social Security Disability fraud today, such as those who use SNAP benefits and ship food to family overseas or claim disability and run marathons.
How is that not an ex post facto law?
I can see changing the statute of limitations for all future debts, but you can't make a legally expired debt active again.
-PJ
For now, just make sure you owe at the end of each year.
For later, have a passport in force and a go bag with cash. Have a stash in a friendly place if you can do that too.
It’s gonna get ugly before it gets better.
The ranch thing, the US Dollar losing reserve/petro status, ... it’s starting to crumble.
How about the money taken from me in overpayment of income taxes because of 20% withholding in drawing from early retirement benefits placed with a Merrill-Lynch by my former employer in a buyout? If for whatever reason you don’t report that overpayment to IRS within 3 years, they just keep it and you can never, ever get it back. The federal government owes me thousands of dollars. My fault, right?
This won’t stop until people start dying. It’s as simple as that.
In addition they will want current value for that missing musket your great-great-great-great grandfather lost during the civil war.
The Department of the Army went after a guy for over $1000 for gear that was unaccounted for from 10-15 years ago, a couple of months ago in WV.
Fox News had a guest on this morning. Somebody tacked one sentence onto the end of a farm bill. Apparently there was some kind of 10-year statute of limitions about to expire.
“My fault, right?”
Well, yes, yes it is.
You are supposed adjust your taxes due by that amount when you file taxes that year. You have three years to file an amended return for any money due to you. There is no year limit on money you owe them.
Something similar is happening to my mother in law. SS claims they overpaid her then started docking her payments, leaving her nearly destitute. There was no hearing, no proof offered, they simply started docking her payments and I believe they even went after her retirement. She worked 20 plus years at the Post Office as a mail carrier. The PO actively discriminated against her due to her age and tried to have her fired so she couldn’t collect her pension. The PO has even lost a legal battle over age discrimination and their shady termination practices of those close to retirement.
“If it wakes up liberals they’ll claim it’s the republicans’ fault and continue to vote for those who are taking their money.”
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That sounds as though it should be sarcasm but actually many of them will do just that. I can say from experience that some liberals actually blame the Republicans for the money that was taken away from Medicare Advantage plan funding by the so called Affordable Care Act. Tell them it is part of the bill that ZERO Republicans voted for and they come back with, “Oh, so you’re blaming the Democrats?”
I kid you not. They don’t like it at all but somehow they refuse to see reality and blame the people who actually did it.
I can’t say that they are all that bad but a big percentage automatically assign blame for anything they don’t like to the GOP without having any idea at all how it came about. Just look at all the ranting about Republicans and the KKK, they don’t have a clue that the KKK began as an arm of the Democratic party and when all the stuff they rant about was going on in the South AND IN INDIANA, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI AND OTHER STATES THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SOUTH it was all done by Democrats. They want more than anything to claim Abraham Lincoln as a Democrat and some actually seem to think he was a Democrat. They want to pretend that Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, George Wallace and the rest of the old time white racists were Republicans, they will not accept that all were Democrats.
I was born and raised in South Carolina and I am about to turn seventy. I can say for certain that in my youth a Republican was almost as hard to find in this state as a hairy frog and people didn’t start to vote Republican because the GOP turned racist, they did it because the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson decided they could buy the votes of black people and have a permanent majority.
What else can you expect from people who imagine that they are going to watch MSNBC and learn the truth that is hidden from them by the evil FOX NEWS?
Make that a go bag with American Gold Eagles.
Witness the death throes of the Welfare State. When spending outstrips revenue, it taxes more. When it has taxed the productive to the point where any more taxes would impact its governing majority, it borrows. When no one will lend it money anymore, it steals. The United States welfare state has reached the point where it is stealing to support its uncontrollable, unstoppable spending. And yet asking the state to cut its budget by 5% is considered monstrous.
A spending freeze is considered evil
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