5156-4        "PAYEE" ARRANGEMENTS

A Family Medicaid applicant or recipient may be serving as a formal or informal agent, trustee, payee, or financial guardian for another person.  Examples of such arrangements include:

• A client who cashes a severely disabled relative's assistance checks and spends the cash to meet that person's needs;
   

• An urban client who occasional receives cash or a money order from a friend who lives in a remote area and needs an intermediary to purchase supplies on his behalf;
   

• A client who has been given signature authority on an institutionalized relative's bank account; or
   

• A client accepts a roommate's share of the rent and passes it on to their landlord.

Such arrangements may involve a joint bank account, signature authority, deposits of the non-client's funds into a singly held account, or simply a hand or mail transfer of cash.

These funds will not count as a Family Medicaid available resource, or as available Family Medicaid income, to the extent that the client can demonstrate that he or she merely passes through the monies, and that they are not used for support of the household.  Prudent judgment will be required in determining whether all or part of such monies can be exempted, as the often-informal nature of many payee arrangements makes documentary proof hard to obtain.

Clients who have such arrangements should be urged to abandon them, if that is an alternative that is allowed by the situation, or, if not, to formalize them if they are informal.  The client should be advised to keep detailed receipt and expenditure records to prevent these funds from being considered as Family Medicaid income and resources.

A 30-day notice period applies to payee arrangements.  When a payee arrangement is discovered, and the client cannot demonstrate the unavailability to the household of all or part of the other party's funds, they should be given 30 days to modify or end the arrangement before the unaccounted-for funds are considered available.