I found another article - that came about because he managed get them to issue a new SS number. They later dropped the issue.
Absent more information, I’m not sure how he committed fraud against the SSA. He left his wife and kid (ostensibly to avoid personal debt, including child support obligations). The wife got him declared dead and made the SSA claim for the benefits. I’m not sure why he would have to pay SSA back.
That seems fair.
Interestingly, I just had this (true) story reported to me yesterday. It happened quite some time ago.
A man disappeared one day… leaving wife and daughter behind. Just vanished. The authorities were of course notified, and no trace of him was found. There was apparently quite a search.
Fast forward 7 years. Wife makes a claim on his insurance. Insurance company does not really want to pay out, so they put their internal detectives on the file. Within 3 days, the guy is located in another province, where he’d been living and working all this time.
It would appear that the initial police investigation was perhaps not as thorough as one would have liked. Left this woman and daughter in the dark for 7 years.
Great finds Doreen! That’s a really interesting case. There’s no apparent benefits fraud by the wife or daughters. I think even if the Social Security Administration could make a good faith argument for reclaiming the benefits, waiver is the right decision.
An etiquette question raised by this scenario: Mrs. Miller is Mr. Miller’s widow. What is the proper term for the relationship Mr. Miller now has to the former Mrs. Miller? Do you suppose Emily Post has a recommendation?
I think so, to - although I wouldn’t object if they didn’t count the time Miller worked under his original number to determine what (if any) retirement benefits he gets. Which I kind of suspect is at least part of the reason for the new number rather than reactivating the old one.
I feel the same but I’d be a bit surprised if the SSA had any authority to reduce his benefits on an ad hoc equitable basis. After all, he didn’t commit benefits fraud either. I wonder if the alternative Social Security Number is just administratively easier for them than trying to correct years worth of incorrect records.
Would there not be some sort of infraction in working 20 years without using his SS number? That would be an interesting trick. I presume he then paid no payroll taxes ether all that time… or he was using someone else’s number. Not to mention income taxes. It would be hard to skip town and stay under the radar and still live a normal working life without committing some such infractions.
And of course he was no longer paying his life insurance policy, so it would have lapsed. (There’s an interesting wrinkle. What if he disappeared, the wife filed a claim, and it turns out he was living across country but died a few years later after the policy would have lapsed? What if he survived on a desert island after a plane crash for 6 months then died, so his policy was lapsed? There are times when being a lawyer can be lucrative… and interesting.
For the OP - I wonder how the Malaysian Airlines case was handled? It was pretty definite the plane was gone, Manifest style. Recently they’ve found floating debris from the aircraft washing ashore in thh Indian Ocean, but for a long time it was a mystery. Did insurance companies make the families wait 7 years?
Maybe. Perhaps as you note he paid FICA under under another number. It’s also possible that he evaded FICA taxes but they have insufficient proof. I don’t know whether evading taxes reduces the benefits that accrue to people for the periods when they do pay their taxes.
I don’t know if they can - but they should be able to. After all, his kids got benefits they wouldn’t have received if he acted like most deadbeats and just didn’t support them. And other people don’t get survivor benefits for their kids and retirement benefits twenty years later based on the same years of work. Actually, I kind of wonder if that’s exactly why he disappeared - so the kids could get the SS benefits.
Can you get another number? I was under the impression that the one you have is yours for life.
I know a company I worked for in Canada began receiving letters from Revenue Canada in the late 1980’s as they reconciled their Social Insurance Numbers (used for all things tax related). “Person X will use only SIN Y from now on.”) A number of Maritime province people would (illegally) get multiple SIN’s so they could work and qualify for Unemployment Insurance under one number while collecting under the other, in an area where Unemployment Insurance was a way of life.
It is , but people who want to hide that they are working ( or who cannot legally work ) sometimes use someone else’s number. That person may or may not be working themself, but will get credit for the SS taxes paid.
Paying under someone else’s number is, I understand, the most common way. I’m not certain but I think some people who cannot legally work in the US (and perhaps this guy) file and pay taxes using a taxpayer identification number. I’m not an expert and I’m pretty sure this is frowned upon at the least but when the IRS’s options are presumably to collect the right amount of money from somebody using the wrong number or to refuse to collect taxes a person wants to pay, they go with taking the money. I would guess that the FICA taxes paid this way aren’t credited to any Social Security account since it’s not a valid Social Security number.