Employer Charged wife for spouse insurance for year even after cancelling
Please let me know if this is not the right place for this, suggestions for where else I should post is appreciated.
So my wife works for the local government but within a healthcare system as a teacher. The way the county works, they don’t issue paystubs but rather they must be accessed online on a secure site that can only be accessed through a portal system that has been broken now for months. The only other way she can access is through a computer directly connected to the county system, but those are in school buildings and she works as a contracted employee in a hospital with no connected computers. So for her to get paystubs otherwise, she must email someone from accounting. The last time she tried that, it took a month for her to get the one paystub. Needless to say, she rarely tries to access them anymore.
In February, I became eligible for health insurance through my employer, so I signed up. Prior to that, I was signed up on my wife’s plan, costing her about $120 per paycheck. At the beginning of March, we knew it was time to cancel the health insurance. My wife went through the proper methods to cancel, which involves emailing the same department responsible for providing copies of pay stubs. They responded saying that in order to cancel, they needed a copy of my new insurance card. That arrived about a week later and my wife sent it to them and that was that.
Around that time, my wife did get a small pay bump, and we also decided she should increase her retirement plan contributions, so between these things her paycheck seemed to shake out alright. However today my wife was signing up for her plan for next year, and she discovered that I’m still covered under her current plan. Further research into her plan account and we can confirm this, which likely means they’ve been deducting an extra $250 per month from her paycheck since March – thats $2,000! I’ve been enrolled and using my current insurance (few thousand dollars this year due to a couple scans I got done).
My question is – given that my wife asked to cancel and we have acknowledgement that they would cancel, does her employer owe her that money back? What is the best course of action here? Located in Richmond, VA.
