A 94-year-old retired teacher who relied on the pension she received for decades logged into her bank account one day to find her monthly check hadn’t been deposited — all because a state agency thought she passed away.
Gloria Wilson spent more than 40 years working for the Los Angeles Unified School District. After retiring, she moved to Texas, but said she never missed a payment from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) until the beginning of this year.
“It was scary. I was upset,” Wilson told KABC.
The family learned why soon after the payments ended. CalSTRS sent them a letter on Jan. 2 saying they “received notification” that Wilson “may be deceased.”
“We got a letter, and it said termination of benefits due to her being dead,” Wilson’s daughter, Melva Williams, said.
“I was really upset. It disturbed me, and I couldn’t imagine anybody saying that I was deceased when I wasn’t deceased,” said Wilson.
Williams said they’ve already followed up with CalSTRS officials to restore her mother’s pension. The agency requested that Wilson and her primary care physician sign a letter proving she was alive, which the family sent twice.
Wilson said the missing payments have already caused her financial strain.
“It was terrible because part of my monthly bills are taken out of my check because it goes directly to my bank, and so I was really upset about it because you wouldn’t want anything to be turned off,” Wilson said.
The family later got an explanation during a phone call and were surprised to learn why the state declared Wilson deceased.
“The way he put it was any one of the retirees that had moved out of state and they not have a California prefix… was running into trouble because of the new computer system that they had set up in October, I think,” Williams explained. “The basic thing is that just like my mother, they were declared dead or ineligible now or something of that nature. And I’m like, what? A computer glitch?”
However, a CalSTRS representative denied that any system errors were behind the mix-up.
“We regularly verify benefit payments for security reasons and to avoid fraud, and we’re not aware of any benefit payments that have been stopped incorrectly. If a member does ever have a payment delayed, we work as quickly as possible to reissue the payment,” a spokesperson told KABC in a statement.
The agency said they’ve resolved the situation. Wilson’s family said the agency resumed payments on Jan. 28.
