Jul 23, 2009

Bureaucracy Sucks

For as long as I've known Trevor, he's been getting a monthly payment from the federal government, courtesy of the SSI program. This check has helped us out with rent and other expenses quite nicely and I've always been grateful for it.

I used to feel a little guilty about it because we weren't in Desperate Need, but I realized that I never felt wronged paying for the program with my taxes prior to meeting Trevor and we do have extra expenses due to his disability and there are jobs he could never get because of his disability, so...I suppose it's a fair program.

Anyway, the month of July rolls up and...no deposit. Figuring there was some sort of technical error, we call them up and "Yeah, you owe us $7000+." Apparently Trevor hasn't been qualified for SSI for nearly a year (makes too much money, I guess), but they didn't catch it until this month. It may somehow be our fault, but as far as I know, we've done everything we should have and filled out all the forms correctly and who keeps paying someone for so long for so much without just stopping the payment? And then stops it with no warning?

A couple days ago we got a letter in the mail that basically said "Send us a money order for $7000 and we'll call it even". Yeah, since we have that. Like we've ever had that much money at once. Not that we're going to go to jail or anything, they're fairly lenient about paying back, but most likely we won't be seeing a tax return for many years to come.

Anyway, this is just a frustrated rant. Good ol' government.

Note: I was *this* close to titling this post "And You Want These Guys To Run Our Health Care System?", but decided it wasn't entirely fair. I've heard plenty of horror stories of equal or greater value about private health insurance companies and/or private health care providers. The trouble with all of these systems is that they require humans to run things and humans don't do things 100% correct all of the time. Heck, even machines that run things don't do things 100% correct all of the time. Bureaucracy sucks.

3 comments:

Valerie said...

Amen.

And good luck.

Unknown said...

Well realize, that since Trevor was working at Verizon and you were also working, that is probably quite a bit over the income cap.

Part of the information with the SSI stuff, is that you get it while you are making under [x] combined dollars between you and your spouse.

The SS department can't keep perfect tabs on what you and your husband are making, so it takes a while for them to update their records. It isn't as if a flag pops up in their system immediately when you get a new job, so they can't alert you when you cross the income threshold.

Andrea said...

11 months, though?