Katrina victims may have to repay money

[tpsbmam]

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered 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 that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces 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 contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."

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."

......

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.

.....

"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."




http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080329/ap_on_re_us/katrina_collections&printer=1;_ylt=AtMt3SSC0qZ9foZZINaUDHNH2ocA

[jcla]

1. First Bush and Brownie ignore Katrina victims...

then Shrub gives tax cuts to the rich and takes back from the Katrina survivors that actually spent their own money to start rebuilding... most have not gotten enough money to rebuild... How many times will the victims of Katrina have to pay for government incompetence? I just hope the voters will remember this when the election comes around... The same people that brought you Iraq, slumping economy and the continued raping of Katrina survivors....Vote Rethug and support these catastrophic policies.