Veterans' quest to get back extra mortgage payments

Veterans' quest to get back extra mortgage payments

Vester Owens had a complaint unlike any I've heard. The retired 88-year-old Air Force sergeant believed he had accidentally overpaid his home mortgage. Not by a little, either. After his Fort Worth house, which he bought in 1953, was paid off in 1973, payments continued to be deducted from his military allotment until 2009.

When he discovered the error two years ago, he and his family believed that he had overpaid by more than $30,000.

....

Vester Owens found some of it. He complained to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which handles retirees' pay for 2.3 million veterans, including him. Once the service learned that he is still alive, it returned $3,500 in overpayments.

Since then, he has tried to get the rest. But Owens, who had a long career in the military and then owned a vending machine company, kept running into the stone wall of big bureaucracy. He was dealing with two massive institutions, and he couldn't get anybody's attention.

Aside from dealing with Defense Finance, the Pentagon's payment arm, he was also pleading with Chase bank, which had come to own the old Texas Commerce Bank, where Owens kept his accounts.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/12/2917260/veterans-quest-to-get-back-extra.html