NEW BRAUNFELS, TX — A New Braunfels woman is fighting an expensive battle, with thousands of dollars on the line.<\/p>\n
Teresa Gonzales is a US Army Veteran, and one government agency is accusing her of not paying for her veteran benefits.<\/p>\n
She has the receipts that say otherwise.<\/p>\n
Gonzales has gone back and forth with the Defense Financial Accounting Service (DFAS) for almost 7 months. The agency claims she owes more than $7,000 for benefits she’s paid every month for the past seven years.<\/p>\n
Now she wants to know where her money is going.<\/p>\n
“$7,639.86 outstanding SBP premiums will be withheld from the annuity payment until unpaid SBP premiums are paid in full,” Gonzales read from a letter she received from DFAS.<\/p>\n
“I have been given multiple reasons,” she explained. “Maybe you’re sending it to the wrong place. Maybe it just hasn’t been put in the right account. Maybe just different reasons.”<\/p>\n
An October 10th letter said Gonzales is behind on payments for the Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP). It’s an equivalent of life insurance for civilians and she’s depending on it; especially for her 22-year-old daughter who lives with disabilities.<\/p>\n
“If something happened to me today, my family would not be paid \u2014 even though I have proof,” Gonzales explained.<\/p>\n
She requested an audit back in April to get a full breakdown of the alleged missing payments. According to that audit, she’s only made 21 payments since September of 2018.<\/p>\n
Gonzales shared copies of the checks she paid with, they show the exact opposite. They also been cashed.<\/p>\n
“What’s happening to that money?,” she asked. “Why am I going back seven years all of a sudden, and I have to prove that I paid money seven years ago…where was that money seven years ago?”<\/p>\n
DFAS asked her to submit proof. She printed out copies of checks for each payment she’s made each month since September of 2018.<\/p>\n
“We took and uploaded the copies to my personal file at DFAS and we sent in hard copies. I called about the upload. They couldn’t find the upload,” the veteran said.<\/p>\n
We reached out to DFAS both via email and over the phone.<\/p>\n
“I’ll take a look at your query,” Steve Burghardt said over the phone. “We’ll see what we’re gonna be able to do.”<\/p>\n
“We don’t really have anything we can do about it,” Gonzales said, adding her feelings of helplessness. “What I want is resolution.”<\/p>\n
She said she refuses to pay the balances DFAS is asking for, saying she’ll prepare for a legal battle if it comes to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW BRAUNFELS, TX — A New Braunfels woman is fighting an expensive battle, with thousands of dollars on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[17178,17175,17180,17179,359,17176,82,84,83,17177,3435],"class_list":{"0":"post-24007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-audit","9":"tag-dfas","10":"tag-legal-battle","11":"tag-missing-funds","12":"tag-new-braunfels","13":"tag-payment-dispute","14":"tag-san-antonio","15":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","16":"tag-san-antonio-news","17":"tag-survivor-benefit-plan","18":"tag-veteran"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}