pas Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 My husband is about to do a compromise settlement with Social Security for a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) overpayment that he has owed for several years. Please chime in if you have any experience/insight into dealing with this, especially if you know if/how it ends up showing on CRs. I'm also sharing this just in case anyone is in a similar situation and you are wondering what options the collections people will be offering you should you receive a collections notice. (Note, in our situation my husband is no longer disabled and the amount owed is not in dispute.)Anyway, their collections rep said that she could offer an 80% settlement, and that was the only offer she was permitted to give. She has to get it approved by her supervisor, then once we receive the settlement statement we have 30 days to remit payment and if we don't we can never ask for another settlement again. The payment plan seemed like the less desirable option - the rep said that they make you pay in full within 3 years, so they basically take what you owe and divide by 36 months and then that is what you must pay each month. And you end up paying more (full amount) than if you can pay the compromise settlement (80%). You can file a waiver to claim hardship and they will lessen your monthly payments, but the time period will be stretched out longer until you finally pay it all. My husband asked about reporting to the CRAs, because up til now this debt has never appeared on any of his reports, and the debt has existed for several years. I was worried that the settlement would trigger a report and it would stick there for however long (I assume 7 years from now, but I wanted to find out exactly how long.) Her only response was "I'm not sure why it never appeared on your credit reports before because we do report to them. I'll have to ask my supervisor about that and I'll call you back." So we're waiting to hear back, but I'm just going to assume the worst since they're the government and we'll be stuck with a neg and bad credit score for at least 7 years. We'll see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isislc Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Ewww, you should have kept quiet about the reporting. Government reporting, tax liens etc, stays on your reports for 10 years and you have to make sure you're on top of that because removing a negative listing from someone's report is not at the top of the list of things for them to do. So, sometimes they can stay on longer than 10 yrs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nascar3 Posted September 1, 2007 Report Share Posted September 1, 2007 Why haven't they just taken it out of your tax refund? That's what they did when my DH owed them money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whocares Posted September 1, 2007 Report Share Posted September 1, 2007 they may be getting less than the standard deduction, they may not be getting a refund...sounds like this is a big problem, I wish you luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samuelson2005 Posted September 3, 2007 Report Share Posted September 3, 2007 I've had to pay back an SSI overpayment before. However, since I was filing BK I included it in. If you owe a huge amount and don't think you can afford to make the payments and don't qualify for hardship then you do have the option of filing BK. Since this money is owed to the government there is no getting out of it. If you can afford to pay them then pay them. If you can't afford it then file hardship. I would've never said anything to the woman about it not being reported on your CR. But, that is not to say that once you settled it wouldn't come back to bite you anyways. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
astiman Posted September 4, 2007 Report Share Posted September 4, 2007 Are you SURE this is the government asking this, or is it a private CA? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pas Posted September 17, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2007 Update: After calling them again, we learned that the settlement was approved, and since it is "compromise settlement and not a charge-off we(they) don't report it to the CRAs." Now, the iffy thing is that the supervisor who gave approval told us that we would get a written confirmation about the non-reporting only after we make the payment and get the final statement saying the balance is zero. Don't know what else we can do but take her word for it. Sorry for missing all of the above replies before... I thought my thread had fallen down enough to stop checking.Nascar3: They have been collecting our tax refund over the past few years but for some reason this year they didn't. Which I'm guessing is why we received a collection notice out of the blue. And the options given us were: agree to our payment plan, have your wages involuntarily garnished, or file a waiver based on hardship (which we can't truthfully claim). The amount of our tax refund probably wasn't paying it off fast enough for them (they said they wanted it paid off within 3 years). samuelson2005: we have the money to pay the settlement, so can't argue hardship. We're just trying to pay it off without it resulting in a report to the CRAs.astiman: Yes, definitely SSA, not a CA. Well, it's the SSA's collection office, but I'm pretty sure they don't have to follow the same protocol as non-government CAs - because these kind of debts don't have SOL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsecape Posted September 23, 2007 Report Share Posted September 23, 2007 thay can and will report it to the cra i have to pay back 3100.00ssiit is in my credit reporti did put it in my bk 7 i will found out on the 5 of octeber Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pas Posted October 2, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 2, 2007 Back with an update. Good news is that someone was able to finally clarify why this has never shown up on my husband's CRs. The account is linked to my husband's deceased father's SS#, which is used as the account number, because my husband was born legally blind, hence his parents originally applied for SSI. Maybe it will stay that way, but I've been so demoralized by this whole thing that I'm not hoping. We sent the settlement payment last week, they received it last week but check has not cleared. We also received notice last week that they went a ahead and mistakenly sent a notice to my husband's employer to garnish his wages. LOVELY! And there was supposed to be a stop on the wage garnishment put into the system since way back in August when he first contacted them and requested a waiver form. You figure if that didn't get put in the system then it might have when the compromise settlement letter was generated (we still have until the end of next week to make sure they received and processed our payment.) My husband has had to call/deal with 3 different offices, and has been told that they can't guarantee that they are going to be able to fix their mistake in time to inform his employer to NOT garnish his next paycheck. What a nightmare. I'm seriously considering contacting my state representative to request "constituent services" help with this. I wonder how effective that is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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