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Veterans being required to pay back bonuses: What am I missing?


Ser Scot A Ellison

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29 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Just sayin'. Look how hard it was for the Congress to pass a bill to fund the healthcare of 9/11 first responders. 

I take the point, but this is the kind of administrative stuff that Congress used to do as day-to-day housekeeping on recommendation from committee. It's more like maintenance of their delegated authority than a whole new thing.

Edited b/c can never spell maintenance. Ugh.

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2 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I don't know, this sounds like a juicy class action suit.

The VSOs run plenty of those, but there'd have to be a way to get it out of administrative jurisdiction first, because agency adjudication does not allow for that. Success rates are dicey.

One could argue that this situation makes a case against exclusive agency jurisdiction.

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Scot,

Unauthorized expenditures from the public fisc are void under the ultra vires doctrine.  Moreover, the Government has a common law right to recover overpayments via unjust enrichment and payment by mistake doctrines.  I'm sure there are statutory and regulatory rights as well.

Congress could fix the problem easily.  I'm sure the agency has discretion to write the debt off after someone requests a hardship exemption.  If not, most agencies are required by law to collect debts unless they are legally unenforceable or uncollectable.  

This situation sucks but it is what it is unless Congress steps in.

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15 hours ago, Ariadne23 said:

I take the point, but this is the kind of administrative stuff that Congress used to do as day-to-day housekeeping on recommendation from committee. It's more like maintenance of their delegated authority than a whole new thing.

Edited b/c can never spell maintenance. Ugh.

The bolded section is the key. 

 

Also, it sounds like this is about to become a 50 state issue. Apparently this happened across the country. 

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Question: Do people think all overpayment cases where the beneficiary is not in any way at fault should be forgiven? On an individually determined basis, like they are now, or as a rule? If as a rule, for veterans only, or all federal government beneficiaries? Should there be a statute of limitations on collecting overpayment? I think yes to the last question, not sure about the others.

 

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11 minutes ago, Altherion said:

The DoD has suspended all attempts to take back the bonuses so it looks like this can be done by the executive branch as well as the legislative.

Interesting. Note he didn't grant an exemption from overpayment recollection like an administrative court would do. Instead, he ordered the agency to stop collections, i.e., he said "we're just not going to enforce the law here." You could say he's on solid ground there to the extent that it really IS a huge waste of the agency's resources, but, OTOH, you could make the objections people always make when we de facto enact law via executive unenforcement. It's not very tidy, from a logical standpoint.

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4 hours ago, Ariadne23 said:

Question: Do people think all overpayment cases where the beneficiary is not in any way at fault should be forgiven? On an individually determined basis, like they are now, or as a rule? If as a rule, for veterans only, or all federal government beneficiaries? Should there be a statute of limitations on collecting overpayment? I think yes to the last question, not sure about the others.

 

If there is an agreement that you are going to pay me X for Y service, but you in turn pay me X+10%, then no I should owe that back to you.  if you paid me the agreed upon amount, no - no repayment.  If I randomly get a check for $5k from somewhere and cash it, then someone comes and wants to collect, I should have to pay it back. 

If in the first case X happened to be too much based on your company/organization but is the agreed upon amount - then no, I shouldn't have to pay that back because it is our agreement.

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1 hour ago, Greywolf2375 said:

If there is an agreement that you are going to pay me X for Y service, but you in turn pay me X+10%, then no I should owe that back to you.  if you paid me the agreed upon amount, no - no repayment. 

Here, I think it's even worse than that, because, from what I understand, the agreement was to pay X, and then it was decided after the fact that the recipients weren't eligible. In that case, like Scott said, it's a clearer issue of apparent authority from at least an ethical standpoint, i.e., how the hell were they supposed to know they weren't actually eligible? They reasonably relied on the representations of a person they reasonably deemed to have the authority to grant the bonus.

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Real life versions of Monopoly's "bank error in your favor" card should be given back. However, if payment was rendered for a service and the service was performed, it is utterly absurd to come back 10 years later and say "Sorry, the people who promised you that money were wrong so you have to give it back."

And yes, there should be some time limit (maybe something like 5 years). As an aside, the scary part here is not that they tried to claw back this money (with sufficient outrage, that can be and more or less has been fixed), but that they mistakenly paid tens of millions of dollars and nobody noticed for 10 years. If they didn't see that, then imagine how many smaller mistakes (and probably outright thefts) are being overlooked.

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7 hours ago, Ariadne23 said:

Question: Do people think all overpayment cases where the beneficiary is not in any way at fault should be forgiven? On an individually determined basis, like they are now, or as a rule? If as a rule, for veterans only, or all federal government beneficiaries? Should there be a statute of limitations on collecting overpayment? I think yes to the last question, not sure about the others.

 

Every day the government sends overpayments inadvertently to senior citizens, disabled individuals, taxpayers, healthcare providers, military personnel,  and government contractors.  Veterans are, perhaps, the most sympathetic of the group.  Yet, the senior citizen on a fixed income also faces a severe hardship repaying an overpayment.  I think, you have to make forgiveness done on the individual level.  Otherwise,  you are arbitrarily favoring certain groups.

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4 hours ago, Altherion said:

The DoD has suspended all attempts to take back the bonuses so it looks like this can be done by the executive branch as well as the legislative.

The exec can't make the same sort of decision as the leg. But it can fail to allocate resources to carry out the law, which is basically what DoD has done. Withdrawn resources to continue with the collection. But at any moment the collection effrorts can be legally resumed.

But what happens now is yet another injustice. Vets who have been collected on are now at a disadvantage to vets that have avoided or not been approached for collection until now. Does the DoD now perversely re-pay out these unauthorised bonuses in order to level the playing field.

The way I see it, either everyone gets to keep the payout or everyone has to return it. You can't leave this thing half done. Unfortunately I don't think the exec has the authority to give any money back to the vets, it'll require legislation to make the historical payments lawful and DoD will have the return the reclaimed bonuses. Such a mess.

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1 minute ago, Tempra said:

Every day the government sends overpayments inadvertently to senior citizens, disabled individuals, taxpayers, healthcare providers, military personnel,  and government contractors.  Veterans are, perhaps, the most sympathetic of the group.  Yet, the senior citizen on a fixed income also faces a severe hardship repaying an overpayment.  I think, you have to make forgiveness done on the individual level.  Otherwise,  you are arbitrarily favoring certain groups.

But as a practical matter, whether hardship forgiveness is done often turns on whether the administrative judge is a cold-hearted asshole or not. There's not much consistency between claims, and they are, as you say, really common. 

It'd be nice to see claims below a certain amount or percentage, preferably some either/or combination of both, be forgiven automatically absent evidence of fraud.

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