Hi Larry you answered my question earlier thus week. Great job, and TY. Guess what I paid my overpayment off in 2019, and have two letters showing they reduced my balance. Now 3 years later they came back with half after stating my bill is paid in full!! I paid them my reduced amount every month for like 2 years. See, this proves I am STILL sick as my more is not good. I don't even know how I could ever forget about it! Can they legally after reviewing my account years ago and setting up a payment arrangement for the balance then giving me a payment in full letter for this? 0 Balance letter. I feel like they are purposely mistreating me, as they know I'm not well....TY for responding, as I can't find anyone to help me.

Hi. Social Security can legally require repayment of an overpayment of benefits, but they can't make you pay back more than you were overpaid. If Social Security told you that your overpayment was fully repaid but later asked you to pay back more, then there must be some type of mistake involved.

If Social Security mistakenly told you that your overpayment had been fully repaid but it actually wasn't repaid in full, then they could still ask you to repay the remaining balance. In other words, Social Security wouldn't be legally bound to forgive the remaining balance of an overpayment simply because they mistakenly notified a person that the overpayment had been fully repaid.

If you do still owe Social Security money due to an overpayment, they generally will allow you to make installment payments if those payments will allow full recovery the overpayment within 3 years. If it would take longer than 3 years to recover the overpayment in installments, you would need to prove to Social Security that you can't pay a higher installment amount due to financial hardship.

However, if you did in fact repay your overpayment in full and unless there was a separate overpayment, then Social Security obviously shouldn't be asking you to pay more back than you owed them. If that's what's happening then you may be able to file for an appeal (https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10058.pdf), but if you're outside of the 60 day period allowed for appeal requests then you'd need to try to work with Social Security to try to get the error corrected. If they can't give you a satisfactory explanation, you may want to consider contacting the offices of your U.S. representative or one of your U.S. senators for help.

Best, Jerry