The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Amount of veteran's debt unclear on both sides

Two government agencies trying to collect same bill from Tipp City veteran

New pool at 'The Heights' opens
5/27/12
Huber Heights suing consultant for more than $50,000
5/26/12
4 arrested for OVI at Kettering checkpoint
5/26/12
Man found dead at bar; police seek suspect
5/26/12
Turner adopts role for Romney campaign
5/26/12
> More headlines

Looking through boxes of letters and forms is Hector Guevara, a Tipp City man who has been dealing with a near impossible government situation.

Jim Witmer Looking through boxes of letters and forms is Hector Guevara, a Tipp City man who has been dealing with a near impossible government situation.

By Jessica Wehrman, Staff Writer Updated 8:27 PM Sunday, June 28, 2009

WASHINGTON — Hector Guevara has a simple request: He wants to know exactly how much he owes the federal government.

Answering that question has been anything but simple. He’s enlisted the help of two congressmen and invested more than 1,000 hours in finding out.

The question became even trickier earlier this year, when a second federal agency started trying to recoup the same pot of money that Guevara argues he’s already paid off.

Guevara doesn’t argue with the fact that, at least at one point, he owed the government money. In 2000, he separated from the Air Force — the military version of a buyout. He got $64,646 and signed an agreement that he’d owe that money back if he either claimed disability from the Veterans Administration or retired from the Air Force at a later date.

During the next decade, he did both. And now both the VA and the Air Force each are claiming he owes them all or part of that same pot of money.

Estimates of Guevara’s debt have ranged from $15,738 to $98,000. At one point, in December 2008, he was told his debt was forgiven. Then in February 2009 he got a letter from the VA telling him he owed $23,470.59. In April, another agency got into the act: The Defense Finance and Accounting Service told him he owed the Defense Department $64,646.

That created a whole new hurdle: Because he has yet to receive a requested audit of how much he owes, he couldn’t prove to the Defense Department that he’d already been paying his debt.

“All I want is for the departments to talk to each other,” he said.

Guevara didn’t realize he had a problem until 2006, six years after he separated from the military. When he was rated 30 percent disabled in late 2000, he received a letter indicating the government would recoup his separation pay by taking his disability benefits and applying them directly to his debt. He heard nothing more, and received no account of his debt or what benefits were being applied to that debt.

One day in 2006, he started getting checks from the VA. Mystified, Guevara, who had by this time been activated and was no longer eligible for the checks, put them into an account and called the VA three times to try to get them to stop sending the money.

“They told me to hold onto them because they were going to recoup it,” he said.

So he did. Then he got a letter from the VA: Not only did they want to recoup the checks he’d received, they wanted to collect more than double that amount, which came to $56,221.

Guevara was astounded. VA officials had told him that they were keeping his benefit checks to pay off his debt. Now, they apparently wanted back pay for the benefits he’d received while he was on active duty — benefits he’d never seen and knew little about.

He asked for a full accounting of the VA debt, and said he couldn’t get it. The VA, he said, had never sent him any sort of stub establishing his debt so that he could track it.

Finally, after months of phone calls and e-mails, he got a spreadsheet that he said was based on erroneous service dates, wrong collection rates and even the wrong number for how many children he has.

“I said, ‘this is untenable,’” he said. “And they said, ‘just pay it.’”

Even as he appealed the debt, the federal government began taking money from his Air Force paycheck and keeping his tax returns to repay the debt.

In 2008 he approached then-Rep. David Hobson. R-Springfield, who fired off a letter to the VA asking them to stop their aggressive collections until they could perform a full audit of what Guevara had already paid and what he owed. At the time, the federal government was holding back $4,000 of Guevara’s pay.

When Hobson retired at the end of 2008, U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, picked up where Hobson left off. It was Austria who fought the Defense Department’s April letter claiming that Guevara owed him the full $64,646.

“The different agencies were not communicating with each other,” Austria said. “The VA was collecting on one side and not communicating it to DFAS, and DFAS was saying, ‘we have no records of you making any payments.”

In May, Guevara and Austria got better news: DFAS was temporarily halting its recoupment of separation payments pending an investigation of how flexible the agency can be in collecting money.

A DFAS spokesman said the agency wants to conduct a formal review of how the law is written and determine what sort of flexibility it has in collecting debts. VA spokesmen did not return repeated calls for comment.

Austria said he’s relieved Guevara has some relief, but acknowledges it’s temporary. He said he’s investigating legislative or administrative solutions aimed at preventing Guevara’s problem from happening to other veterans.

“Clearly, this problem is larger than Hector,” he said.

Share this article