WhatFinger


The government would never abuse its power, right?

Treasury targeting taxpayers for payment of decades old debts incurred by long-dead family members



Buried in the 2011 farm bill was an obscure passage which eliminated the 10-year statute of limitations on the collection of federal debts. Previously, if Uncle Sam didn't collect after a decade, they were out of luck. That's no longer the case, and the government is going after hundreds of thousands of American taxpayers as a result.

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Yeah, you read that right. "In many cases" they don't have any records or evidence to support their claims. They just have a dollar figure and the name of someone who may or may not still be alive. The "debts" in question are overpayments made by the feds, so it was actually their fault in the first place. Worse, if they can't collect from the person who originally received the overpayment, they've decided to go after their heirs. The Washington Post has the story of Mary Grice - a Maryland woman whose state and federal tax refunds were seized by the government in an effort to correct an error it made way back in 1977. Instead of her checks, she received a letter saying that her refund had been confiscated to settle a "debt" she never even knew existed...
When Mary Grice was 4, back in 1960, her father died, leaving her mother with five children to raise. Until the kids turned 18, Sadie Grice got survivor benefits from Social Security to help feed and clothe them. Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family - it's not sure who- in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. Why the feds chose to take Mary's money, rather than her surviving siblings', is a mystery.
These days it's federal policy to target the oldest sibling first. If they prove to be too much of a headache (or too poor) they move on to whoever is next in line. Basically, they just work their way down to the youngest until they get their cash. However, Mary Grice is the middle of five children. One of her surviving siblings is older and has never had anything confiscated. So no one has any idea why Mary was targeted first.
"It was a shock," said Grice, 58. "What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can't prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus."
For the record, Social Security claims that they did send a notice, but they sent it to a P.O Box that Grice hasn't rented since 1979. Nobody knows why they didn't send it to the address where the "we took your refunds" letter was sent. Honestly, it doesn't matter, since the letter is the least disturbing part of this. As Grice's attorney puts it:
"The craziest part of this whole thing is the way the government seizes a child's money to satisfy a debt that child never even knew about," says Robert Vogel, Grice's attorney. "They'll say that somebody got paid for that child's benefit, but the child had no control over the money and there's no way to know if the parent ever used the money for the benefit of that kid."
Vogel misses the point. This isn't about trying to "do the right thing" or "rectify an old wrong." It's a cash grab, pure and simple. Perhaps that's why, initially, the Treasury held Mary Grice's entire $4,462 refund without explanation. This happened despite the fact that Social Security claims that the debt was just $2,996. Only after media pressure began to mount was the difference returned. The fact is this is nothing more than a shakedown. The feds are confiscating taxpayer's refunds with impunity and have, since the statue of limitations was eliminated, managed to collect more than 424 million dollars - all of it from debts over 10 years old. Most of the time, the debts are low level so victims find it cheaper and easier to pay than to fight the massive federal bureaucracy. The government is doing this simply because it can. Who's going to stop them?



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