Woman Can’t Wake Up From Red-Tape Nightmare

Carmen Bills is trapped in a bureaucratic gulag.

It is one of those things, one of those nightmare things. Fact is, nightmare was the exact word that the latest friendly representative from the Social Security Administration used to describe Carmen’s situation when he talked to her over the phone.

He would try to help, the man said, emphasis on try . That’s what they’ve all said, and have kept saying, for nearly two years.

But Carmen’s situation sounds like the next great short story that Franz Kafka might have written. Carmen Bills, loving wife and mother of five, conscientious office manager, member in good standing of the Mormon church, sucked into the vortex.

All because of somebody else’s mistake.

What happened was this. Carmen, 51, decided to get a job in 1969. It was in accounting, in West L.A. She applied for a Social Security number through her company, and it came through the mail. No problem here.

Carmen kept working, taking time off for the birth of more children, and changing jobs a few times when she and her husband moved. She worked eight years at Taco Bell’s corporate headquarters in Irvine, then started her current job at the UC Irvine in 1989. Nothing more spectacular to report.

She did marry for the second time in 1987 and went down to the Social Security office in Santa Ana to notify the government that she was changing her last name from Gomez to her husband’s, which is Bills. Naturally, she gave her Social Security number. Everything was fine.

Then as a Christmas present for her son, Carmen decided to have cable TV installed in their Costa Mesa home in late 1990. Over the phone, the representative from the cable company asked Carmen for her Social Security number and she obliged.

Then the cable company rep asked Carmen whether she’d recently moved from Florida. No, she had not. She asked for Carmen’s birth date. Hm, came the reply. Was her last name ever Gomez, or Garbo? Carmen explained about Gomez but said she most definitely had never been a Garbo. Why ?

Well . . . Carmen would soon begin an odyssey that bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Alice after she fell down that rabbit hole.

When she went to the Social Security office after her chat with the cable rep (who then refused to issue the service under Carmen’s name), they told her that she’d been given a number already issued to somebody else. That person is named Carmen Garbo (nee Gomez) in Florida who was born on the same day as Carmen Bills, only a year before.

So the Social Security office issued Carmen a new number and told her that her 21 years of work experience would be transferred to her new number, if not right away, then soon . That is, in the bureaucratic sense of the word.

And seeing as how Carmen is a person who tends to take others at their word, she assumed things would be straightened out. Just in case, however, she started writing detailed letters to Social Security headquarters in Baltimore. Periodically, she’d get little form notices saying that she was still on their minds.

Carmen would call, too, and visit her local Social Security office, just to let them know that she was still there, waiting and hoping for the best. Sometimes, she’d have to take off work, seeing as how the Social Security office is closed on weekends.

And every time she visited, or called, she’d talk to somebody new. That’s how these things work. It’s the luck of the draw. Some representatives are nice, others dismissive and rude.

No matter. The outcome has still been the same. Nada , zip and zilch.

Then Carmen called the hot line earlier this month. There she found the chatty representative who described her situation as a nightmare come true.

See, not only does Carmen Garbo still have Carmen’s earnings credited to her account, but now the Florida woman is receiving Supplemental Security Income, too. She applied for Social Security Disability, but was turned down.

Carmen, meantime, only has one year of work credited to her new number and still, because of the mix-up, she has problems with her I.D.

(The other day at the pharmacy she couldn’t pick up her prescription because they said her Social Security number didn’t match the one they had on file.)

And what if something terrible were to happen to Carmen? Could she or her survivors get any of the benefits that are their due?

Let us just say that Carmen should try to hang on for as long as she can.

“I want them to get on the ball,” Carmen says. “I’ve been patient. I’ve been waiting long enough. I feel my rights are not being taken care of and this is money that I earned. It is not somebody else’s.”

Carmen says that she feels her hands have been tied. She’s done what she can, and still. . . .

“I feel like somebody is just pulling my strings, that they are pacifying me all the time.”

I called the Social Security Administration, too, and talked to a helpful supervisor who pulled files and made some calls.

Seems that headquarters in Baltimore has no record of any mix-up between Carmen Garbo and Carmen Bills, although the supervisor said that she’s confirmed that everything Carmen Bills told me is true.

“It’s getting real complicated,” the supervisor said.

She went on to say that based on Carmen’s work history, it is obvious that her earnings have been wrongly credited to the other woman’s file. The other woman, she said, has a total of only $528 that she earned.

“Believe it or not, we will be working to straighten this out,” this helpful government representative said.