Sadly, veterans sometimes become disabled during the course of their service to our country. There are government programs aimed at helping veterans that this happens to. The Department of Veterans Affairs provides disability benefits to veterans. Also, depending on the effects of their disability, a veteran may qualify for Social Security Disability benefits.
Given the brave service that veterans provide our country, one would hope that veterans who have become disabled would always receive the benefits they are entitled to and that the transfer of such benefits to them would always go without a hitch. Sadly, though, this doesn’t always happen. Even the federal government makes mistakes sometimes. This can be seen in an incident that recently occurred regarding some veterans’ monthly disability compensation payments.
The matter involved around 12,000 veterans who had come to an arrangement with the VA regarding their compensation checks. For each of these veterans, under the arrangement, the agency was to keep a portion of their check to cover a debt the veteran owed the agency, and then send the remainder to the veteran.
Unfortunately, something went wrong with this arrangement when it came to the September compensation checks for these veterans. The agency accidentally flipped things around and sent the veterans the amount that was supposed to go towards the debt and kept the remainder. This resulted in the agency withholding some $2.4 million from the veterans that it shouldn’t have. The agency has since taken efforts to correct the mistake.
As this illustrates, the federal government is not infallible. There are many contexts in which mistakes can be made when it comes to disability benefits for veterans. For example, sometimes, the federal government denies a veteran SSD benefits when the veteran does, in fact, qualify for such benefits. When this occurs, a veteran may want to turn to a disability attorney for help with the process of appealing the denial.
Source: USA Today, “Government mistakenly withheld $2.4 million in disability from vets,” Gregg Zoroya, Sept. 4, 2014