Mystery payment from the fed

Hi everyone,

New stress today. We applied for my wife’s spousal SSA benefit and had the phone interview on the 5th of this month.
A couple of days later we received the copy of the application in the post. There were two corrections needed, her citizenship was wrong and another regarding a few months work she did here in the UK.

We emailed the corrections to the fbu and I sent a hard copy of that along with the marriage certificate they asked for, and I received the certificate back in my prepaid envelope. There has been no acknowledgement of the corrections to the application.

Today a payment of just over £50 shows up in her account. It seems way to soon and is a tiny fraction of the back payment she was told she would receive and of the benefit amount they gave her.

Anyone ever have another payment show up like this?

I’m wondering if there are even staff at the fbu anymore with all the cuts being made.

Apart from the mystery payment your experience with the FBU sounds very similar to my wife’s. Once your wife does start receiving SS it should come into her bank account via Citibank in Ireland.

There are people working at the FBU because I had an email from them a few weeks ago, to say that my SS application had been reviewed by them and was now being reviewed in the USA. Looking at my application online it says it is being reviewed by an agent in Baltimore.

Update: We logged into her SSA online after it opened for the day.

It says she already has been approved for $33 per month when she was told it would be over 1200.

I have emailed and guess I will spend next Tuesday on the phone.

At least I know they are still working, thanks Durhamlad.

Update: We logged into her SSA online after it opened for the day.

It says she already has been approved for $33 per month when she was told it would be over 1200.

I have emailed and guess I will spend next Tuesday on the phone.

At least I know they are still working, thanks Durhamlad.

$33/month sounds totally wrong.

Good luck with your phone call. When I tried last month I kept getting a message saying that the lines are open, transferring you now, followed by a different voice saying all our agents are busy, try again later and dropping the line. I called 45 times  that day but never got through.

I have no experience with spousal benefits, but can comment on SSA/FBU "surprises". Without going into the details (they are described in other threads), I've encountered nothing but surprises and poor communication from the FBU and SSA since April 2022. I'll just tell you the most recent one.

Last month, I realised I had not been paid my SSA retirement benefit. No letter in the mail, no messages in my SSA account, just no payment for January. I eventually found out that my payments had been "suspended" for not submitting a particular form (7162) in 2024. The thing is, I HAD submitted the form in 2024 (twice!), and had delivery confirmation records for both occasions. So, I duly filled in the relevant form AGAIN, and sent it with copies of the same form from the two previous occasions, copies of the delivery receipts for the two previous occasions, an appeal form (SSA-561-U2) and a brief cover letter. I sent all of this to FBU AND sent it all to SSA in the US.

I received confirmation of delivery to FBU on 11th February. Today, on a whim, I decided to log into MySSA account. Lo and behold, my payments have been reinstated for this month - but no indication of what is being done about the incorrectly suspended payment for January.

From my experiences over the past 3 years, their errors do have a habit of rectifying themselves, eventually, but usually without any letter or message explaining what the heck was going on. Frustrating, but I've learned to always give it a little time before I blow a gasket. ;-)

Thanks for your comments. I miss being able to take a 10 minute drive from home to visit my local office.

Dunroving, I’m glad you’re getting paid again, I hope the rest follows shortly.

Congratulations dunroving.  And thanks for keeping us updated.

Update to spousal benefit. My wife received her first payment for the full spousal benefit this week. We haven’t received the notice for it yet but those seem to come from the US so I expect 2-3 weeks perhaps for that to arrive.

Didn’t have to call as the fbu responded to our email about 15 minutes before I was to start phoning  explaining that it was being processed. Huge sigh of relief there.