As you are reading Dailykos because you are tired of working on your tax return with only 5 days to go before you give up and send in the extension, I would recommend an outrageous (and long story) in the Washington Post about a program now on the radar where the feds are seizing Federal and State tax refunds to satisfy old social security overpayments sometimes made to the deceased parents of the targets. The Post reports that " The Treasury Department has intercepted $1.9 billion in tax refunds already this year — $75 million of that on debts delinquent for more than 10 years.... " Apparently the farm bill, in addition to cutting SNAP benefits, also relaxed the 10 year Statue of Limitations on going after government debts. SSA referred 400,000 cases to Treasury. Seizing refunds
In the main case discussed in the article. The Treasury seized $2,996 dollars from a woman for survivor benefits paid to her mother more than 30 years ago for an alleged overpayment in 1977. She is suing to recover the funds. Social Security claims they have no records to document the alleged overpayment that Treasury seized.
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.”