To explain, my wife and I went on social assistance a year ago for 3 months. I was on disability, not getting paid by insurance at the time, and the course she was going to take for the summer, which made her eligible for student loans, got cancelled, canceling the student loan money she was going to get. We'd received no income for 3 months, so we applied for social assistance. 3 months go by and I start receiving money from the insurance again. Because of the lump sum I got, social assistance wanted all the money they gave us, back.
While I understand that I did get a retroactive payout from the insurance company, the social assistance people never actually told us that we could owe the money we got, back.
I applied to have the case reviewed by the local tribunal, and we got word today that they could have sided with us based on the fact that social assistance never informed us we'd owe the money back, but they decided that “we should have just known”… she even states that she could have limited the money we had to pay back, but because it's a year later, and we're finally financially stable, “we can afford to pay it back in full”.
What pisses me off is that ultimately… all they had to do was wait. 6 months ago, I told them we were too financially strapped to pay anything back, but now, because we worked hard to turn our situation around, we can't prove that paying it back would financially hurt us… so… we now have to pay back 4000$… just because we're now doing better. Like, why didn't i just get a fucking loan, instead? Literally what is the point of social assistance?
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