Is There Ever an Easy Medicaid Application? Part 3

Continuing the topic of my last 2 blog posts, I was discussing a snag we hit with a Medicaid application – the discovery of at least one account of which our clients had no recollection.  When we identify the bank in these situations, that has always been enough for the bank to locate any and all accounts even when we don’t have the account numbers.  For some reason, in this case, the bank came up empty.

As I stated last week, client tax returns with 1099s will give us the account information.  Unfortunately, in this case the clients hadn’t filed a tax return in many years because their income was low enough and they didn’t keep the 1099s.  So what to do?  Since financial institutions generate 1099s for any account that earns interest and must report it to the IRS, we asked a family accountant to obtain a tax transcript.

Once we received it, we were able to identify account numbers for 2 client accounts which we forwarded to the bank.  They were then able to find the accounts and produce statements showing all activity for the years in question.  The accounts were closed 2 years into our 5 year look back, however, there were some transactions that had to be traced as far as where the money went.  Additionally, the accounts each closed with a balance which we also had to trace.

Typically, each question answered often leads to additional questions that also have to be answered.  That’s exactly what happened here in out seemingly never ending quest for Medicaid eligibility.  Next week I’ll tell you what we did next.