UPDATE: The acting commissioner for the Social Security Admn Carolyn W. Colvin has stopped this collections procedure until further notice.
“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 to refer debt to the Treasury Department. If any Social Security or Supplemental Security Income beneficiary believes they have been incorrectly assessed with an overpayment under this program, I encourage them to request an explanation or seek options to resolve the overpayment.”
This story really upsets people, so I thought I would put this development at the top and the bottom. See original diary below.
A friend informed me that one of their FB friends had forwarded a story about how the government is now allowed to collect tax debts owed by people way way back in the day (try the 1960s) from children and grandchildren via their tax returns.
See more below the Orange Flaming Hoop.
The initial FOF (friend of a friend) story was attributed to a certain news agency that is not well liked for a variety of reasons, so I jumped on the intertubz to see if I could find this story through a more reputable outlet.
And here it is: April 5 2014 Washington Post: Social Security target taxpayers children and grandchildren for their parent's decades old debt
So theoretically, if your parents messed up on their taxes, or received an overpayment from Social Security or whatnot-- and didn't repay from the 1960s, the IRS can come after you, if that parent is dead or whatever.
Correction: This appears to be about overpayment only, and not about misfiled taxes, but about the garnishment of tax returns to cover the overpayment by a federal entity, and this applies not just to the removal of the statute of limitations against living debtors, but also to their surviving children or grandchildren or spouse if those individuals were on the record of the debtor (thus far).
Sorry about the confusion. However I do not believe that this detracts from the outrage.
No more statute of limitations, no lets go after the little people who are already hurting financially for the alleged sins of their parents. That's what bothers me the most--going after the children and grandchildren who were not of age to even be co-conspirators in any sort of fraud, or the children of people who never knew they were supposedly overpaid by social security or any other federal agency.
One of my own parents who has since moved to another country, warned me that this place was being turned into a debtors prison and it looks like that parent might be right.
What really stood out in this story--Any relative who might have benefited from those payments can have their returns garnished, even in the absence of the original paperwork. Remind you of anything? Like the massive mortgage fraud wherein one-time home owners discovered that banks didn't hold the appropriate paperwork to even prove that the person losing their home, even owed them money.
How can a citizen challenge that? Will the government allow it?
The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam. (WaPo)
And
"no one seems eager to take credit" for it. Yea, I can see why, but still I do believe that there will be a concerted bipartisan effort by the people to get to the bottom of this mess.
No one seems eager to take credit for reopening all these long-closed cases. A Social Security spokeswoman says the agency didn’t seek the change; ask Treasury. Treasury says it wasn’t us; try Congress. Congressional staffers say the request probably came from the bureaucracy.ibid
It's another case of "Who is in charge?" again. Seriously if you are going to take a monster crap like that on people, be proud. Stick a flag in it with your name on it, don' hide your turd behind a bushel.
So if children received benefit from public assistance received by their debtor-parent, the children's tax returns can be garnished at any time in the future. So let that be a lesson to us all. Don't spend any money on your kids, no food, no clothing, nothing otherwise you could be setting them up for a fight with the IRS 20 years down the line. Does this strike anyone else as odd? Is there something I am missing?
Are we not legally obligated as parents to provide essentials for our children, and to deprive them of food, shelter, clothing, etc., would be neglect. This is a problem (overpayment) that plays out in the military and the VA often. The military or the VA overpay you, only difference being they want their money back yesterday. It's usually not an issue for them to come after people or their kids 20 or 40 years later--as in they generally don't that I know of.
Looking at this mess on has to ask: Where is the accountability for the comptrollers? Why aren't we going after the people who screwed up the payments in the office 20 or 40 years later? Shouldn't they have to pay as well?
Sending SSN checks to people who are most likely poor and desperate for cash to buy essentials like shelter and food, especially depending upon the educational level of the family and the stress level too--those people aren't going to check too closely to make sure that the check is on the dollar.
As someone who has dealt with the VA with overpayment claims, all it takes is 3 or 4 partial over-payments to put you in dept for several thousand dollars. We aren't talking a huge overpayment, and it might not even be apparent, because you never know what rules change behind the scenes that determine what you get and why. Every time this happened to me (and it happened frequently--it felt arbitrary, there was no obvious place to look at and see how this happened or why I would miss it) They (govt entity) sends you a check and it looks to be the right amount, and tell you everything is fine. Then you get another letter in the mail wanting some huge amount back because someone allegedly screwed up somewhere.
How many homes will be lost because of this insanity? How many families will be financially destabilized over this in the here and now, because 20 or 40 years ago, Daddy bought them some school clothes and some groceries or paid the rent?
I dream of a day, when the huge corporations in this country are finally required to pay their fair share of taxes, and then there will be no excuse for this sort of abuse of the bureaucratic powers of the IRS and other arms of the government.
I am more than happy to pay my taxes, and I believe we need social security and medicare and medicaid, and the affordable care act--
The whole point of paying taxes, some of which go to people in need, is to build and maintain infrastructure and reduce poverty and suffering. The reason for that is to rebuild the middle class and to make a dent into the massive cycle of poverty that America suffers from. Because she is in a death spiral right now thanks to that.
Governmental Wealth extraction from the poor will not stop that Death Spiral. It will only speed it up. And piss a lot of people off in the mean time.
This is something that we need to know who inserted that language and why, and then fix it.
4:42 PM PT: A kind reader posted a story from 2013: NBC Chicago: Law Erases Statute of Limitations on Federal Debt: http://www.nbcchicago.com/...
The good news is that this doesn't appear to be about messed up taxes, only that if one is overpaid by a federal agency, then one can have their income taxes garnished.
"If you are thinking 45 years is too far for the government to reach back, you would have been correct until very recently. The tiny section tucked away on page 561 of the legislation allowed the federal government to blow out any existing statute of limitations and go after debts decades old.Thanks to the "Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008," anyone overpaid by a federal agency, at any time in their life, can now be tracked down and put on the hook for debts that are decades old."
I am going to be looking for more information on this topic.
4:44 PM PT: dharmafarmer added: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/...
pp560 in the pdf file:
SEC. 14219. ELIMINATION OF STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS APPLICABLE
TO COLLECTION OF DEBT BY ADMINISTRATIVE OFFSET.
(a) ELIMINATION.—Section 3716(e) of title 31, United States
Code, is amended to read as follows:
‘‘(e)(1) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, regulation, or administrative limitation, no limitation on the period within which an offset may be initiated or taken pursuant to this section shall be effective.
"(2) This section does not apply when a statute explicitly prohibits using administrative offset or setoff to collect the claim or type of claim involved.’’.
(b) APPLICATION OF AMENDMENT.—The amendment made by subsection (a) shall apply to any debt outstanding on or after the date of the enactment of this Act.
_
4:49 PM PT: Change.org has a petition for this purpose, the posts are a month old, so I am unsure if it's active or not. https://www.change.org/...
5:13 PM PT: lyvwyr101 Wrote about the WaPo story back on the 4th of April. Sadly it didn't get noticed. I would have uprated then and there had I read this earlier diary.
http://www.dailykos.com/... (Thanks to Blacksheep1 for bringing this to my attention).
7:26 PM PT: A search on Thomas.gov of HR2419 of the 110th Congress has shown that the language of this statute was in the bill's language when it was first introduced to the Senate Calendar on Sept 4, 2007. In the version that was passed, the statute was number 14219, but in the original enrolled language this statute was marked Section 11314 see http://beta.congress.gov/...={%22search%22%3A[%22HR+2419%22]}
If this page linked to is correct, then the language was not slipped in at the last moment, but appears to have been in the proposed legislation all along.
I will gladly stand corrected if I have misinterpreted this data.
Mon Apr 14, 2014 at 3:32 PM PT: Good News!
From Social Security Press Office Statement:
“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 to refer debt to the Treasury Department.: https://www.socialsecurity.gov/...
If any Social Security or Supplemental Security Income beneficiary believes they have been incorrectly assessed with an overpayment under this program, I encourage them to request an explanation or seek options to resolve the overpayment.”
Statement of Carolyn W. Colvin Acting Commissioner of Social Security-April 14, 2014 Special thanks to Jackson L. Haveck for posting this news in the comment thread.