Benefit Lawsuit Settled By Social Security Agency For $500 Million
Posted on:8/13/2009
Written By: Chris Robideaux
| The already beleaguered Social Security Administration has agreed to pay a total of $500 million to 80,000 people whose benefits were wrongly withheld by a federal program intended to deny payments to those fleeing arrest, the National Senior Citizens Law Center said. |
The already beleaguered Social Security Administration has agreed to pay a total of $500 million to 80,000 people whose benefits were wrongly withheld by a federal program intended to deny payments to those fleeing arrest, the National Senior Citizens Law Center said. The agreement was part of a class-action settlement given initial approval yesterday by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, California, the center said in a statement.
The Social Security Administration used a computer system matching arrest-warrant names with agency data to deny benefits, according to the law center statement. The agency was attempting to carry out a law that seeks to prevent people from using government benefits to avoid arrest, the group said.
Many matches involved false or unproven allegations, minor infractions or dormant warrants, said the legal group, which represented plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit.
Legal advocates for the poor, elderly and disabled secured a $500-million class-action settlement Tuesday for as many as 200,000 people whose Social Security benefits were suspended on unfounded suspicions that they were fleeing prosecution.
The suspensions, dating back nearly a decade in some instances, were ordered in cases of mistaken identity or outstanding warrants for offenses such as bounced checks or traffic violations.
"Virtually none" of the Social Security recipients who were cut off after their names were matched with those in a computerized warrant database were felons using their government benefits to evade law enforcement or prosecution, said Gerald McIntyre, an attorney for the National Senior Citizens Law Center.
More often, those deprived of their sole source of modest income were people like lead plaintiff Rosa Martinez of Redwood City, Calif., whose name matched that of a woman with a 1980 arrest warrant from Miami for drug offenses -- a city she had never visited and a crime she never committed. The drug suspect described in the arrest warrant was eight inches shorter than Martinez.