FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each, BlackAmericaWeb reports. The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.
This comes six years after disbursement of the funds intended to help victims of Hurricane Katrina seek new shelter and put their lives back together. And the funds are due within a 30-day period, just in time for income tax season. Other than getting a refund back from Uncle Sam, very few people have the resources to come up with a quick $4,600, let alone those effected by Hurricane Katrina. Such an oversight should have been written off as a loss and left alone.
There's been plenty of talk about the spending habits of those effected by Katrina, namely of the "booze and rims" variety. People make mistakes, and many people don't do well when confronted with the management of large sums of money given in one lump. Not much you can do about this aside from a copious amount of fiscal management education, one of the many things that no one wants done in this country.