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More Social Security nonsense.. they claim we owe $8,762!

Social Security Administration - Incompetent or Corrupt?

Despite Erin’s Social Security Disability Insurance eligibility being put under immediate review, after a 3-year battle for her to get SSDI, the Social Security Administration continued to pay her a monthly payment of between $1,419 (2022) and $1,543 (2023), and after a whole year of deliberation, they have finally decided that Erin was not eligible for six months between August 2022 and January 2023.

This week, we received a ‘notice of overpayment’ letter from the Social Security Administration, claiming Erin was not eligible for SSDI from August 2022 through January 2023, claiming we owe $8,762, and they want payment within 30 days of five days after the date on the latter, which is August 21, 2023.

Overpayment Information

Your overpayment was caused due to a change ip the month of entitlement for the period of February 2023 through July 2023. In the chart below, we will detail how we arrived at your overpayment amount. We will list what you have been paid and what you should have been paid.

You Received

08/2022—12/2022 — $1,419.00 — Total: $5,676.00
11/2022—07/2023 — $1,543.00 — Total: $12,344.00

You Should Have Received

02/2023—07/2023 $1,543.00 06 — Total: $9,258.00

How To Pay Us Back

You should refund this overpayment of $8,762.00 within 30 days. Please make your check or money order payable to “Social Security Administration,” and send it to us in the enclosed envelope.

$5,676 + $12,344 = $18.020 – $9,258 = $8,762, which we now owe. Obviously paying back $8,762 is not possible, we needed that money to pay our bills, $658 for medical insurance + $551 for a personal loan, made up mostly of medical debt, we didn’t put it in savings to squirrel it away. People who qualify for Social Security clearly don’t have enough money to live on, or they would not qualify in the first place.

Since paying it back in one lump sum is not an option, starting from December 2023, SSA will withhold the full benefit for 5.6 months to recover the money they claim we owe. This will financially cripple us, we cannot just lose $1,543 a month and be fine. We are not the Pentagon, we can’t just lose billions of dollars down the back of the sofa, every penny of our SSDI payment is 100% accounted for.

We have no option but to appeal as we cannot afford to lose this financial lifeline, and it was not our fault, we provided SSA with all the information they asked for, and did not lie about any part of our situation. Realistically, I am not expecting to win any appeal, not because we did anything wrong, but because it’s the government, and of course, they never make mistakes, right? The best I am hoping for is that the SSA don’t be total dicks, and take the entire benefit, I think if they took $500/month, we could just about manage on the remainder of the payment if we were to make some cuts in our lives.

If we had lied about our financial situation and got caught, I’d say it was a fair cop and sucked it up, but that is not the case. If the Social Security Administration believed we should not have received SSDI, they should have withheld it, which would have still screwed us, as we would have not had medical insurance for Erin and the kids, and I would have defaulted on my personal loan, but at least we would not owe anything to the government, what this has done is kick the can down the road, not at all helped us.

I have reused the featured image from the original blog about this situation, the same question applies, it took the Social Security Administration a whole year to make a decision, and now we get to pay for it.

Update: Sep, 16 2023: I think we might have figured out what happened!

Erin talked with the lawyer who helped her get SSDI in the first place, and the lawyer reminded her that from the time of eligibility, there are six months of nonpayment before they start paying out the benefit. Erin was approved in February 2022 and didn’t get her first SSDI payment until August, which is six months. We know this because, they said that Erin had earned too much money during February through July, and we were confused as we were not receiving any benefits during those months. So now, we can speculate that the SSA is now saying that the start date of eligibility was August 2022, meaning Erin should not have received anything until February 2023, so they have moved the damn goalposts.

This is clear bullshit, they are the ones that screwed up, why should we have to pay for their screw-up? I don’t believe it was a screw-up, I believe it is a deliberate attempt to defraud us of money we are rightly entitled to. This leads me to believe that like all levels of government, they are corrupt as f**k! But none of this matters, we dont have the money to launch a legal battle, and our lawyer does not handle overpayment disputes, leaving us at the mercy of the bean counters at the Social Security Administration.

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