ATLANTA — The US Senate is expected to vote Wednesday night on a bill that could restore Social Security benefits to more than 50,000 Georgians.
Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray has reported on how a law from the 1980s has prevented many public servants from being able to receive Social Security benefits, despite paying into the system.
The clock is ticking for Senators to vote. This has to happen this week or the whole process starts all over again.
At 68 retired Atlanta school teacher Verdialla Turner is still working but worries what happens when she no longer can.
“I’ve worked another job the same time that I was teaching school. All of my life. I’ve been working since I was 16,” Turner said.
But Turner can’t collect the Social Security she paid into with those jobs.
She’s one of the 3 million Americans, mostly public servants like teachers and police officers, affected by the Windfall Elimination Provision - nicknamed WEP -and the government pension offset.
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They received a pension from a job that did not pay Social Security taxes but also paid into Social Security over the years through other jobs.
But WEP means they don’t receive Social Security at all.
“This is about doing right by teachers, first responders who pay into Social Security throughout their careers,” Georgia US Sen. Jon Ossoff said.
The Social Security Fairness Act would eliminate WEP.
It passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly last month with support from Democrats and Republicans and must pass the Senate this week to become law.
Ossoff is one of the bipartisan group of Senate supporters.
“They’ve been unfairly penalized by bad legislation in the past. That’s why we’re working to pass this legislation to strengthen the retirement benefits for teachers, firefighters, first responders,” Ossoff said.
But a group of Conservative Senate Republicans have been fighting the effort to pass the law change before the end of the year,
“It is something we need to fix but this is not the way to fix it,” North Carolina US Sen. Thom Tillis said.
Tillis worries about the $200 billion dollar cost of the bill to the Social Security Trust Fund.
“Know that you are making the job harder to fix the trust fund that is 10 years from going insolvent,” Tillis said.
Now that they’ve voted to proceed the chance of passage with a final vote is strong.
But the Senate is on a time crunch to pass several bills before they leave this week and that handful of senators who oppose this could use procedural methods to try to slow down the Senate to prevent a vote.
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