When Dan was finally allowed to retire and go home, he started to receive bills for Survivor Benefit Plan premiums in the mail. Torrey, who handles his finances because of his brain injury, called the Defense Finance and Accounting Services and asked if they could unenroll. She was told by a government official to simply not pay the bills. If her husband didn’t pay, his dependents just wouldn’t receive the death benefit. But Torrey remained concerned because the bills kept showing up in their mailbox, so she called several more times. She was then told it was too late. Dan had missed the one-year window to leave the program, between the second and third year after retirement. Neither Torrey nor her husband remembers receiving any notice warning them of that. Other families they knew, who were also trying to get out of the program, faced similar problems.

“It was like an endless loop of conversations that went nowhere,” Torrey says. “I had other things to worry about.” The bills kept coming in the mail each month, and then the letter saying Dan owed money arrived this February. It gave no guidance on how to leave the Survivor Benefit Plan but listed a toll-free number. Torrey called and waited on the line for two hours for a representative. Again, a Defense Department representative told her that her husband missed the narrow window of opting out of the program. Torrey learned that because Dan is disabled, there should be a loophole that allows him to unenroll, but she was disconnected from the call before the representative could provide her with information on how to do this. The Shannon family is eligible for an almost-identical benefit through the Department of Veteran Affairs because of Dan’s disability rating, for which he doesn’t have to pay monthly premiums, but the government does not allow families to receive both entitlements, so the V.A. benefit is deducted from the Survivor Benefit Plan total. What Torrey would have received from the Survivor Benefit Plan will be either eliminated, or nearly eliminated, by this offset, which is commonly referred to by military family advocates as the “widow’s tax.” While Congress has tried to remedy this with a special payment, called the Special Survivor Indemnity Allowance, it falls $948 short per month. For the Shannon family, this means they are now receiving an automatic deduction for a benefit that won’t fully benefit them.

In May, the first deductions of $173 started hitting Dan’s monthly check. Torrey wrote a letter to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service asking, again, that he be removed from the program. “Please be aware that this benefit was never elected to our knowledge, and if it was, it was not explained clearly and in writing to both of us to make a choice in the matter,” she wrote. “Mr. Shannon has a traumatic brain injury and has no memory or paperwork of this process of election.”

“We don’t have the benefit of arguing this in a court anywhere,” Torrey says. “We don’t have the benefit of speaking to someone knowledgeable. We don’t have the benefit of truly appealing this process.” For the Shannon family, a monthly cut to Dan’s compensation means that they will have to tighten their budget. There will be less money for groceries and gas. “When a couple hundred dollars comes out of your pay every month, that hurts,” Torrey says. “That affects your quality of life.”

For Dan, this isn’t the first time the government has come after his benefits. In 2010, the Defense Department said it had overpaid him in moving costs, but it never produced any of the underlying weight tickets from the moving company to prove it. Despite Dan’s seeking help from Senator Mark Udall’s office, the government began to deduct his Social Security payments by nearly $200 per month to pay off a $7,465 debt, which included over $1,633 in fees, interests and penalties that had accumulated as the couple fought the debt for over a year. Ultimately, they were forced to pay it back. The ordeal damaged Dan’s credit score.