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?
Getting a tax refund is giving the gubmit an interest free loan for a year.
It appears to me they are going to be responsible for 17 trillion.
In ancient times children were held responsible for their parent’s debts. I thought the constitution did away with that. Am I mistaken?
Everyone is a criminal in Acirema - except for Mohammedans, illegal aliens, union thugs, blacks, homosexuals and the mental incompetants in Versailles on the Potomac.
You would be surprised how many people do not comprehend that fact.
Just wait until they collect the fees (plus penalties and interest) from descendents of Civil War veterans who failed to return their government issued uniforms after the war.
Many who get refunds paid nothing in, mostly Democrats
Everyone? That’s about 48% of the population you just listed there!
Are they going after those that received welfare benefits? Fairness to me says that they would go after those people first.
It is far more than that when you count unfunded liabilities such as SS and Mediscare.
I love this story, more and more every day the people who vote for more government are getting just what they deserve.....
Wait till people start hiding wealth and the government comes to their homes and takes them away to be re-educated like the other fascists in NAZI Germany did......
“Section 9: No Bill of Attainder or ex-post facto Law shall be passed.”
I guess that means the Government is not breaking the law. They did not pass a law to do it. They just did it.
They'll find out that garnishment is not something you put on your salad.
If it wakes up liberals they’ll claim it’s the republicans’ fault and continue to vote for those who are taking their money.
We just need to bring back debtors’ prisons to fix all of this....oh, wait...
Leeches Rosie....
Do your best not to be in a situation where you are going to get a “refund”. A refund is nothing but your overpayment that the gov holds on to, then returns to you.
However, California started issuing IOU’s a couple of years ago. Small business men tried to cash the IOU’s at banks and were told to go pound sand. Also, obamacare has provisions to withhold your refund if you have not paid your fine for not having insurance.
Remember the statement, “As California goes, so goes the country”. Politically we are there already. Now comes the enforcement.
Waiting for Obama’s response. I’m sure a reporter will ask about this/s
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