Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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Medicare Part D spent $587.7 million on five drugs anyone can buy off a shelf
Medicare Part D isn’t supposed to pay for drugs a person could just pick up off a store shelf. Federal auditors found that for three straight years, Part D plans kept paying pharmacies for five drugs long after their brand-name versions had switched from prescription-only to over-the-counter, and nothing in the system was set up…
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A Missouri caregiver admitted stealing more than $320,000 from the veteran whose groceries she was buying
A caregiver in Dent County, Missouri pleaded guilty this month to stealing more than $320,000 from a client who had handed her his debit cards for one simple errand: buying groceries. Loretta Pyeatt, 52, admitted the theft played out over roughly two years while the man she cared for lived on his monthly Social Security…
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Social Security rescinded a 1989 court rule that protected SSI recipients renting from a relative
For nearly four decades, people receiving Supplemental Security Income in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont had an extra layer of protection when they rented a home from a relative at a modest price. That protection came from a 1989 federal appeals court ruling, and the Social Security Administration has now formally rescinded the internal ruling…
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Medicare paid about $380 million over six years for organs that were never transplanted into its own patients
Medicare pays transplant hospitals for the cost of removing and shipping a donor organ, but federal law limits that reimbursement to organs that are actually used in a transplant covered by Medicare. A federal watchdog just found that limit wasn’t enforced for six years running. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector…
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The Federal Trade Commission is weighing whether a store may quietly show one shopper a higher price than another
A gallon of milk, a mattress, or a plane ticket could carry two different price tags for two different shoppers looking at the same website, and neither shopper would ever know it happened. The Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal review of exactly that possibility, asking whether a retailer that uses a customer’s personal…
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A tax preparer cannot get a client’s identity protection number, and anyone offering to is not a preparer
Every tax season, someone tries to file a return in another person’s name and collect the refund before the real taxpayer ever gets to the mailbox. The Internal Revenue Service’s core defense against that is a free, six-digit Identity Protection PIN that only the taxpayer and the agency are supposed to know. In early September,…
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Tax preparers are now required by federal rule to use two-step login before opening a client’s file
When a paid tax preparer sits down to open a client’s return this season, a federal security rule now stands between that preparer and the file. Under the Federal Trade Commission’s Safeguards Rule, tax preparation firms must use a second layer of login verification, not just a password, before anyone on staff can view a…
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The Internal Revenue Service stopped about 19,000 stolen-identity returns and held back $138.5 million
The Internal Revenue Service caught nearly three times as many fraudulent tax returns filed under stolen identities this filing season as it did the year before, according to a government watchdog’s audit released in June. The agency confirmed about 19,000 returns as identity theft and kept $138.5 million in refunds from reaching thieves, as of…
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The Federal Trade Commission says Amazon hid a surcharge in its ad auctions and shoppers paid for it
When the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 22 states sued Amazon on August 31, 2026, they described a pricing scheme that never showed up on any receipt. The lawsuit alleges that for more than seven years, Amazon quietly charged advertisers more than its own auction rules promised, and that those extra advertising costs…
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Every 2027 tax bracket circulating right now is a projection, because the Internal Revenue Service has not published them
Spreadsheets, YouTube videos and “tax planning” posts claiming to show the 2027 federal income tax brackets have been circulating online this fall, some listing specific dollar cutoffs for every filing status. None of those numbers come from the Internal Revenue Service, because the agency has not published them. For a household trying to plan next…