Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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Thirty widows past 70 gave up $748,272 because nobody told them they could switch benefits
Some retirees who lose a spouse discover, too late, that Social Security offered a choice nobody explained to them: collect a survivor benefit now while a retirement benefit keeps growing untouched, or file for both at once and lock in a smaller combined check for life. A new inspector general audit found that choice went…
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Every state Medicaid program is moving to most favored nation drug prices
All 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have applied to a new federal program that ties Medicaid’s drug prices to the lowest price paid by other wealthy countries. Forty of those states and Puerto Rico have already signed the agreement that makes participation official, and the rest are working against a hard…
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Social Security gave 420 newborns two Social Security numbers, and one state caused 187 of them
A Social Security number is supposed to follow one person for life, tying every dollar of reported earnings and every future benefit application to a single record. A federal audit released this month found that assumption broke down for 420 babies born between 2021 and 2024, each of whom ended up with two numbers instead…
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Medicaid renewal paperwork starts arriving twice a year on January 1
Starting with renewals scheduled on or after January 1, 2027, most adults covered under Medicaid’s expansion group will have their eligibility checked every six months instead of once a year. The change comes from a provision inside the 2025 federal law the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services calls the Working Families Tax Cut legislation,…
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Internet service can no longer count toward a food stamp shelter deduction
A household on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that pays $70 a month for home internet used to be able to fold part of that bill into the deduction that lowers countable income and raises a monthly benefit. A provision buried inside the 2025 federal law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act erased…
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More than a million people waited about five and a half weeks past normal for a refund this year
Each June, the National Taxpayer Advocate delivers Congress an assessment of the tax filing season that just ended, and this year’s verdict was largely positive: the Internal Revenue Service processed nearly 139 million individual returns and issued more than 90 million refunds despite new tax law changes and a shrinking workforce. But folded into that…
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The IRS flagged 7.5 million returns for identity theft, and about half of them were legitimate
The Internal Revenue Service runs dozens of computer filters designed to catch fraudulent tax returns before a refund goes out the door, and those filters also catch a lot of honest taxpayers along the way. A new watchdog report puts numbers to that tradeoff: of the roughly 7.5 million individual tax returns the IRS’s identity…
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A widow collected $1,856 a month for years when Social Security owed her $2,170
In October 1992, a wage earner died at age 32, leaving behind a wife who would not apply for survivor benefits for another 24 years. When she finally filed in December 2016, the Social Security employee handling her claim used 1992 — the year her husband died — to calculate her benefit, instead of 2009,…
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Social Security declared 24,219 living people dead in five years and recorded no reason in nearly half the cases
The Social Security Administration incorrectly recorded 24,219 living beneficiaries as deceased between January 2020 and December 2024, an error that can freeze a monthly check, trigger a bank account closure or block a credit application before anyone involved realizes what went wrong. A newly released audit from the agency’s own Office of the Inspector General…
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A Jamaican sweepstakes ring leader got eight years and must forfeit $6,166,227 taken from older Americans
A federal judge in White Plains, New York, closed the books on a sweepstakes operation that spent a decade working the same trick on retirees: call a stranger, tell them they had already won, and collect the “fees” before any prize could ship. The scheme ran phone banks and text campaigns out of Jamaica for…