Mom's been there almost a year now and SS office says this should be routine for NH. She is on medicaid and I pay her pension from her checking account the balance is the SS payment. Has anyone else had this experience? It is like they have no clue as to what steps to take. I get a bill which they call a statement, every month balance due is SS payment. I have made many efforts to resolve this but I get nowhere.
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Carol
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In order to set up a SS direct deposit you need:
1. an on-line account at SS. This is easy and you can do it in just a few minutes.
2. Once you have that you acting as your mom's DPOA can have her SS made a direct deposit into any bank account.
3. Now you need to decide what banking system works best - it can either go into mom's bank account and then you send the NH a cancelled check for that exact amount for them to do a monthly automatic debit. (Although this sounds good, it is a PIA as the amount can change annually and you might have to do a new check for every year); OR you can have the monthly SS go into the NH bank account. You will need their bank routing number to do that and you do it through your mom's SS on-line portal. It takes about 30 days to get done. So if she get's paid on the 2nd then you do it on the 4th so that it is as close to the next payment window; OR you pay them each month a check in the exact amount as her SS.
Most NH don't give out their account/bank route info. If you want to do it this way
then you and someone from billing will need to sit and go-line together to have the direct deposit changed to the NH. SS will give you a confirmation when you complete the on-line process and the NH should get the payment within 3 - 6 weeks from when it was done.
SS & you are right in that NH do this all the time and it should be very routine.
My suggestion is to send another letter to billing and CC it via certified letter return registered mail to both the administrator for the NH and to the owner of the NH. Owner info will be state NH site - if not the owner then whomever is the chair of the board of directors of the NH.
Sending RRM is very important in that it establishes they received it. This is done thru the USPO and runs about $ 5 - 8.00.
In the letter detail what has happened over the past year with specific payment history (check # 123 mailed 1/3/10 deposited 1/28/10) and when you had conversations on this and then say you need to have this issue resolved within the next 30 days - tell them how happy/content/well cared for you mother is as their NH BUT your mother gets concerned/agitated/depressed, etc. whenever you tell her there is still a problem with accurate crediting of HER social security money by the facility and you are concerned about how this affects her mental health.
We had a real issue with my mom's LTC billing. For 3 cycles the amount "due"
was incorrect and didn't correspond to her assets and the checks were taking 4 -6 weeks to clear and we were getting late notices. The financial gal was totally inept and she is now gone as we were not the only ones. However I was told it was the RRM sent to the chair of the board of directors that got her investigated and asked to resign. When she left they found a stack of checks from the prior month that hadn't been deposited. Good luck!