Story Archive

TheIRS

The U.S. Social Security Administration thinks it overpaid someone in 1977, and it was not necessarily Mary Grice who received the money. But 37 years later, the Internal Revenue Service seized Grice’s tax refund to pay the “debt.” When Grice was 4, her father died and her mother, since deceased, received Social Security benefits to help raise her kids. The IRS went after Grice, but not her siblings. Social Security says all it needs to claim your money on an old “debt” is that as a child you indirectly benefitted from an overpayment to your parent. Grice, 58, says she wasn’t even notified about the “debt” until her money was taken. Social Security says it sent notice not to the Takoma Park, Md., apartment where she’s lived since 1984, where it sends her annual Social Security statement, but to a post office box in North Carolina she last used in 1979. (AC/Washington Post) ...If the government can recover Social Security overpayments, what about all those retirees getting more than they put in?
Original Publication Date: 13 April 2014
This story is in True’s book collections, in Volume 20.

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