Air Force Community - Air Force Times

Kill ‘widow’s tax’ for all

Some widowed spouses got an early shot of holiday cheer when a federal appeals court recently ruled that they are entitled to full survivor benefits from the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments if they are eligible for both payments.

For decades, such widows have had their Survivor Benefit Plan payments from the Defense Department reduced by any amount they received in Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from VA.

Military advocacy groups call this offset the “widow’s tax,” and have made its elimination a top legislative goal.

But for complex legal reasons, the court ruling ends the offset only for a small slice of the survivor population eligible for both SBP and DIC — specifically, those who remarry after age 57.

The ruling, in Sharp v. United States, which the Pentagon says it will not challenge, creates a starkly unfair schism.

The survivors who benefit are those least in need of relief from the SBP offset, since presumably their new spouses have income streams of their own through jobs, pensions, Social Security or other sources.

Meanwhile, the more than 50,000 survivors who have not remarried and are eligible for Defense Department and VA benefits — many of them elderly and on fixed incomes — still have their SBP payments reduced by any amount they receive in DIC.

This inequity is too absurd to stand. Now that the offset has ended for some survivors, eliminate it for all.

If the Pentagon cannot broaden its interpretation of the court ruling on its own, Congress must step in with a change in law.

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