Katrina Victims May Have to Repay Money

[Political Heretic]

Source: Truthout

New Orleans - Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant. Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars. Thousands of Katrina victims may be in that situation.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

...

The bid invitation said: "The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000." The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF's highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases - overpaid by an average of $35,000 - proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.

...

"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."

Read more: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/033008C.shtml

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God damn america.

[RedSock]

1. $175 million

that gets wasted in iraq -- what -- every hour or so?

[Zhade]

2. What's next, making rape victims pay for their violator's lawyer?

Jesus fucking christ, I hate this country sometimes.

[tanyev]

3. "A private contractor under investigation for the compensation"

But everyone knows that privatization is cheaper and more efficient than having the government do it.



:sarcasm:

[dysfunctional press]

4. ICF needs to eat those losses.

from the article-

" The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, and helped it buy out four other companies. It now reaches into government contracting sectors that include national defense and the environment."

so they got an extra $156million on top of their original contract, for just shy of $1BILLION.
the fuck-up was COMPLETELY theirs, and they are the ones who should be paying.

[raccoon]

5. Why didn't those Enron SOB's who raped California have to pay those people back?

I think a public caning of their arses would've been in order.