For as long as I have been employed by the state, I have taken advantage of flexible spending accounts for day care. Basically, what it allows me to do is to have pretax income withheld from my paycheck for child care, and then get reimbursed out of the withheld money after I pay the babysitter. It’s a reasonable system on paper. In practice, it has been an aggravation from the word go.
My last reimbursement claims were no exception. They lost them. I noticed one, called, and got it found and processed. I figured I was done. While I had lost a bit of money due to miscalculation of how much I would spend, I had still saved far more in taxes than I lost to overwithholding. Well, it seems when they went searching for the claim I called about, they found another and processed them both. End result? I have a bit more money than I had expected, and they didn’t get to keep a penny.
We have a different company taking care of those accounts this year. I was not the only person to be annoyed by the service, or lack thereof, of the prior provider. It remains to be seen if the new one is any better. But I am much amused that I ended up with money I had written off because the company handling it for 2003 goofed up one last time.