Authority twice declares senior citizen dead, although she is alive - Now a "heavy fight" threatens
Created: 01/27/2022, 12:28 p.m
By: Lisa Mayerhofer
An elderly lady goes for a walk with her walker as an assistant.
(symbol image) © Imago
An elderly woman has been wrongly pronounced dead twice by Canada's financial authorities.
Now the Treasury is demanding money back.
The excitement is correspondingly great.
Winnipeg – In March last year, Canadian Dave Gibeault received a letter from the tax authority* about the estate of his mother, Mary Gibeault.
He knew immediately it was a mistake.
“I see my mother every day, I take care of her.
So my fear wasn't that she died," he told Canadian news portal
CBC News
.
"The first thing I thought of was that I had a tough fight ahead of me."
Namely against the authorities to have his mother classified as alive again.
In addition, it is also about money that the authorities are demanding back, since Mary Gibeault is allegedly dead and has received unlawful benefits.
The senior lives in a nursing home in Winnipeg, Canada.
Canadian elder: Two mistakes in a year
In fact, it took several weeks and "hours of phone calls" before Gibeault was able to reclassify his mother as alive.
He thought the problem was solved.
Then in January he received another letter from the IRS - they had declared Mary Gibeault dead again.
That was the second time in ten months.
"It's very frustrating.
I know this is going to be another tough fight," the son told CBC.
At the request of the CBC, the tax authority regretted the problem, but did not want to comment on individual cases for data protection reasons.
Reasons for the errors could be human error, misunderstandings between authorities or providing an incorrect social security number.
Canadian tax authorities get it wrong time and time again
Mary and Dave Gibeault are not alone in Canada with the problem: Between 2007 and 2013, 5,489 Canadians were incorrectly registered as deceased in the IRS system, according to a study by a complaints review board.
Dave Gibeault believes that these mistakes still happen today - with serious consequences for those affected: "This is a much bigger problem and does not only affect individuals.
And not everyone has an advocate standing up for them.
So there's a whole range of people who don't get their benefits," he fears.
In Germany, too, people are wrongly declared dead
Incidentally, people in Germany are now and then wrongly declared dead: in 2011, a 52-year-old North Frisian woman who actually only wanted to leave the church was wrongly declared dead by the registry office.
The officer had made a mistake.
And last August, the
Peiner Allgemeine
reported on a pensioner from Rostock who was also declared dead twice due to a mistake in the pension insurance system.
The 73-year-old then lost bank accounts, health insurance and her pension*.
She, too, had to fight to be registered as alive again.
*Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA