Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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Delivery costs $18.71 per thousand cubic feet on a home gas bill
Most of a home’s natural gas bill has nothing to do with the price of the gas itself. Federal data published August 31, 2026 show the residential price of natural gas averaged $24.09 per thousand cubic feet in June 2026, while the wholesale citygate price, what a local utility actually paid to receive that same…
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A Banco Popular employee is barred from banking for taking customer funds
A former telephone banking consultant at Banco Popular de Puerto Rico in San Juan has been permanently barred from ever working in banking again, under a Federal Reserve Board order naming Gadiel J. Rosario-Alvarado. The Board’s own order says Rosario-Alvarado misappropriated roughly $65,747 from bank customers between 2023 and 2025 by debiting money directly from…
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A proposed $103,265 fee on skilled worker visas is open for comment
The Department of Homeland Security wants to add a $103,265 fee to certain H-1B visa petitions, and the number is drawing attention because it is larger than many workers’ annual salaries, not because it is already law. DHS published the proposal on August 25 as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and the public comment period…
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The IRS is telling workers to recheck withholding this week, because the new deductions changed the math
The IRS put out a reminder this week, timed to National Payroll Week, telling workers to pull up their last pay stub and check whether the right amount of federal tax is coming out. It’s the kind of notice that’s easy to scroll past, but this year it lands differently: the new deductions for overtime…
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Insurers actually paid $6.5 million of the $1.3 billion a shell equipment company billed Medicare
Prosecutors say a Pennsylvania medical-equipment company submitted at least $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims to Medicare and other insurers over five months in 2025, but the money that actually left those insurers’ accounts was a fraction of that: about $6.5 million. The gap between the number in the indictment and the number that got paid…
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One operator enrolled 14 labs and billed Medicare more than $24 million
Medicare doesn’t just pay claims and hope they’re legitimate. It runs a growing fraud-detection operation aimed squarely at laboratories, and a case CMS disclosed at the end of August shows how far a single operator can run before that system catches up. One person, using a consulting company, enrolled 14 labs in Medicare’s fee-for-service program…
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A single-room unit gets three quarters of the studio rent ceiling
Not every voucher-assisted household needs a full apartment. Some HUD-funded housing covers a single furnished room with shared bathroom or kitchen facilities, and the agency prices that unit type differently than anything else in its rent schedule. Under the fiscal year 2027 fair market rents HUD published September 1, 2026, effective October 1, a single-room-occupancy…
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Every bedroom above four adds 15 percent to the federal rent ceiling a housing voucher will cover
Every October, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recalculates the rent ceilings that decide how much a Housing Choice Voucher will actually cover, and this year’s update takes effect October 1, 2026. Most of that math tracks what a family would really pay to rent a two-bedroom apartment nearby. But once a household needs…
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Rural Alaska’s smallest food stamp payment is $49, twice the lower 48’s
When USDA sets next year’s food stamp numbers, most of the attention goes to the maximum a household can get. But the program also has a floor, and starting October 1, 2026, that floor is not the same everywhere. In the 48 states and Washington, D.C., the smallest monthly SNAP payment a one- or two-person…
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The largest food stamp household the government pays is capped at $3,887 a month no matter its size
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has told every state SNAP office exactly what a household can receive starting October 1, 2026, and for the biggest households, the number stops climbing. A household of 18 people gets the same monthly maximum as a household of 30: $3,887, loaded onto an EBT card whether it’s feeding two…