What is wrong with the social security administration here in the United States? The government department is supposed to be there to help people in need but our experience of dealing with the SSA has been a nightmare. We were supposed to be getting SSI benefits for our autistic son to help with paying for all his therapies and now we owe $3,752.77 because they claim we were over the resource limit for over 12 months, we’re baffled by how they came up with that conclusion as we’ve not been over for 12 months; in reality we were over the limit for just five of those months.
Let’s go back in time; about 12 months ago; we were having problems reporting our wages using the useless voice recognition phone system, it kept on getting it wrong, it managed to get $2,400 confused with over $24,000, if we were earning $20k each month, we wouldn’t be dealing with these idiots. Anyway, the wages were being reported incorrectly, my wife called up SSA and explained the situation and they said she could fax in her wage slips as she was already faxing in our child support information. About two months ago, we get a letter saying the SSA will be calling us; and over the phone, the rep told us they haven’t received any wage submissions for 12 months; despite them mailing us letters saying we reported $2,xxx, where did they get those figures from?
We sent in a raft of information from wages slips to bank statements as requested by our case manager; which we did and they claimed that it wasn’t received and now they want us to send it again, plus new added information. We only found this out because we called the SSA on Tuesday 25th, left a message for the case manager, 24 hours later, still no callback so we called again and talked to a dozy rep that wouldn’t even listen to what we had to say, kept on talking over us. Basically just repeating from a script instead of listening and addressing our issues, saying we had to send in information, which changed every time we challenged him, asking for a September bank statement, which isn’t available until today, remember this happened on Wednesday 26th Sept.
A couple of days later we receive the letter saying we owe almost 3,800 dollars, of course we are going to appeal as we don’t owe that amount of repayment as we were only over the resource limit for five months, the repayment figure should be more like $1600, which we will pay out of savings, wiping the savings account out; but for $400, then they can start paying us SSI benefits again as we will be massively under the resource limit by some $3,200. And finally we received another letter today saying we have to pay $138.56 within 10 days, or they’ll take further action, such as taking it from our tax return in March or garnishing money directly from our earnings!