My Day With Kafka
The funeral home said they would contact Social Security, so I didn’t have to worry about that. The credit union charged back the automatic deposit from Social Security that was posted after the death, so I didn’t have to worry about that.
That’s why I was taken aback when the letters started arriving from the Social Security Administration wanting to know why the last deposit was returned. I called and told them because my Mother had died, and they said that they didn’t know she had passed away. I checked with the funeral home who confirmed that they had notified Social Security and gave me the confirmation number. Even after I called back and gave Social Security that information, the letters kept coming.
Finally I went down to the local Social Security office and waited to give them a death certificate. After 30-45 minutes my number was called and I presented all of the letters and a death certificate to the clerk who looked at his screen and said: ‘You didn’t need to come in, the funeral home reported her passing.’
I explained that the people in the benefits center in New York told me I had to file an official, certified, rainbow-colored, ten dollar death certificate.
The clerk looked at the screen for several minutes, and suddenly moved his mouse and clicked. He said that whoever got the report from the funeral home had neglected to check a box.
Apparently if you return money to any government agency except the IRS they freak out. This doesn’t bode well for the VA, my last major notification, and someone I need to return money to because of the automatic deposit.
6 comments
LOL Ahhh… I’m only laughing (humorlessly) because I had a very similar experience here! Especially when I decided to do the right and humane thing of telling everyone not to prop up the florist industry, but donate the money to the RDNS. The ATO (our IRS) sent me a letter and a form almost three years later, demanding to know why I hadn’t declared the donation to the RDNS! Since the *donation* came from about 30 people, most anonymously, how was I supposed to do that? Apparently, since RDNS is a registered ‘charitable institution’, and the donation was rather large (I must say that I was impressed by the generosity of Mum’s friends & family), they wanted to know how I could afford such a donation since my declared income that year and previous 2 years was quite low! It took a high-powered lawyer friend of mine, the RDNS (the managing Director of which sent a carefully detailed letter explaining that it wasn’t unusual, and confirmed my story as he attended my Moms funeral) & the Funeral Home a year to get it sorted out! The ATO even was suspicious that the MD of the RDNS attended the funeral of someone he didn’t even know! Social Services was almost as bad regarding Mom’s pension which was cancelled, mainly because she had dual citizenship, and was receiving payments from the UK for her RN (Royal Navy) service as a Nurse/medic at the end of WW2… Ahhhh, forget it!! I certainly want to!
Much easier for the gutless bastards to go after someone little, than the really big crooks who screw them out of millions every year!
It’s all totally FUBAR m8! ALL of it, everywhere! You cannot escape institutionalized stupidity, and they really SHOULD be institutionalized… In padded rooms!
Just about all tax and social services officials are 100% sub-human morons and assholes, wherever they are in the Word! And THAT is a fact m8!
The problems with the US agencies are all caused by Congress. The mystifying regulations are all based on laws passed by Congress, usually to help political donors with no regard for the average citizen. The IRS goes after the little guys because Congress has rigged the system making it very difficult to go after the big crooks. If you can afford the lawyers and accountants you can stall the system for years while you work to change the law to make what you did legal.
In addition, watching the witch hunt that the Republicans are on over the VA makes all agencies nervous.
The people working in Federal civil service in the US are seeing their benefits disappear along with their job security. The Republicans have been making the working conditions of Federal workers worse every year. More and more functions are being outsourced and things are getting worse at every level.
They keep trying to get people to use their crummy websites that were created by contractors who don’t actually understand the system, and the local conditions are so bad, they have a security guard while the workers are behind bullet-proof glass like bank tellers. The system really sucks, because Congress wants it to suck.
If you want to go into the Social Security office here, you line up outside the Federal building. Only a certain number of people are allowed inside the Federal building at any given time. You wait in line, someone comes out, someone else is allowed to go in. Finally you arrive at the security guard. You show him your government-issued ID and tell him your business, and he looks at you suspiciously because as usual with drivers’ licenses it only barely looks like you and finally tells you to walk through the metal detector. You then get to go up to the 2nd floor offices of the Social Security Administration. There is a vast waiting room, of which only a dozen or so chairs are actually occupied. The workers are in booths behind bullet-proof glass (plastic, actually) with holes cut through to pass documents through. You take a number, and wait. You’re called. You tell them why you’re there, and give them the form they need. They verify the form is filled out correctly, verify two forms of identification including at least one government-issued photo ID against the form, and then let you go.
Something that should have taken five minutes just ate two hours of your life.
The Feds have gone security nuts since 9-11. What a total waste of time, money, and resources. They make people jump through these hoops but won’t require universal background checks to buy weapons – it’s just bloody insane.
The hilarious thing is that I could have told that guard anything plausible and he would have let me into the building. The guy after me didn’t even have any ID, he was a homeless guy and I’d talked to him while he was in line, he was there to get a replacement Social Security card because he’d been bum-rolled while drunk and stripped of all his ID. He’d already done the rigamarole on a previous day with multiple people certifying that he was who he said he was and so forth, now he was picking up the actual card, since he had no mailing address to mail it to. He told his story to the guard, and the guard let him through. The guard actually didn’t have much choice, some local homeless advocates had sued the SSA and gotten a court order saying they had to let homeless people through to get replacement cards.
It’s all security theater, in the end…
Exactly, it’s all about making people feel safer, even though they aren’t. But they were not really in a great deal of danger in the first place. It’s kind of like wearing a charm against sharks and alligators in the desert 😉