California: Payment In Social Security Suit Ordered.

A federal judge in Oakland has tentatively approved a settlement requiring the government to pay more than $500 million to tens of thousands of people wrongly barred from receiving Social Security payments. The Social Security Administration over the past several years withheld benefit checks from recipients found to have outstanding arrest warrants, saying it was complying with a 1996 law requiring that payments be stopped to recipients ''fleeing to avoid prosecution'' of a felony. A class-action lawsuit filed last year asserted that the policy had been wrongly applied. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]