Topic: Treasury seizing tax refunds from adult kids to pay parents’ decades-old debts

[Pandora]

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.

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... 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.

 

[IronDioPriest]

Good thing we have those limited-government Republicans to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen huh? Maybe if we elect a few more of them, THEN they'll be able to turn back the tide, cuz we KNOW they really want to.

[OldSailor]

Good thing we have those limited-government Republicans to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen huh? Maybe if we elect a few more of them, THEN they'll be able to turn back the tide, cuz we KNOW they really want to.

Yeah, right, pull the other one.   

[John Florida]

  I'm sure that underpayments will get the same attention as overpayments are getting.But wait the change in the law doesn't allow for that does it.   

[LadyVirginia]

why the charade?

just announce we have to fork over whatever money we have when ever they want it

serfs we all are

[Libertas]

Same as the Medicaid lookback, right?  Beat the crap out of the inheritors of an estate for whatever the Fedcoats can get their filthy theiving hands on...

Somebody someday is going to catch a Fedcoat tax goon, lop his hands off and send them to DC with bloody coins in it...

[Pandora]

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/15/social-security-suspends-its-ancient-debt-collection-efforts/

“I have directed an immediate halt to further referrals under the Treasury Offset Program to recover debts owed to the agency that are 10 years old and older pending a thorough review of our responsibility and discretion under the current law,” the acting Social Security commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said in a statement.

Who thought this was a good idea in the first place? After all, SSA didn’t just decide to open the books all on its own. The 2008 farm bill passed by Congress lifted the statute of limitations on debt collection. Who inserted that codicil, and why?

It’s not just that amendment, though. The FTC notes on its website, as the Post’s Marc Fisher points out, that family members aren’t responsible for a relative’s debt to the government, and yet SSA tried to collect those debts from other family members anyway. Members of Congress erupted in outrage over the last couple of days — after constituents began demanding accountability for SSA’s actions. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) argued that SSA didn’t even follow the limits within that codicil by allowing for proper notification and by illegally seizing offset payments instead of processing the debt collection properly:

... Walter Olson hits this point at Overlawyered:

    The next step should be to establish for the public record how the provision in question got slipped into the farm bill, and at whose behest. Congress’s refusal to be forthcoming on this topic speaks volumes about its lack of a felt sense of responsibility toward the people it represents.

    And a theme I’ve been repeating for almost as long as I’ve been writing about law: statutes of limitations developed in civilized legal systems for a reason. They protect us not only from cost, uncertainty, and the misery of legal process, but from injustice of a hundred other kinds, and they protect society itself from spiraling into a legal war of all against all. Stop trying to abolish them!

[Libertas]

What, people don't read the shyt they vote on!  NO?!?!

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Waiting for Medicaid lookback theft of inheritors in 3..2..1..

(crickets)

They ALL can go directly to Hell!

The sooner the better for us all!

[AlanS]

“I have directed an immediate halt to further referrals under the Treasury Offset Program to recover debts owed to the agency that are 10 years old and older pending a thorough review of our responsibility and discretion under the current law,” the acting Social Security commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said in a statement.

They're just biding time until they can figure out how to access 401k's.