You couldn't do it, but we've decided we want to.

Up until last year, I had two work-related retirement accounts. There was one from my active-duty Army time, and one from my federal civilian employee job. To simplify things, I decided it would be best to combine the two.

However, I ran into a problem. Way back in January 2011, I failed to discontinue my retirement contribution before I deployed to Afghanistan. As a result, there was 30-something tax-exempt dollars that *couldn’t* be combined. I called up the customer service line, but there was no way around it. I was stuck with two accounts, one of which had a mere 30-odd bucks in it.

It was irritating, but I reconciled myself to it. I let it go.
Well, today I got a check in the mail. It turns out that – because my account was less than $200 – they didn’t want to deal with it. So the U.S. Treasury sent me that money.

When I wanted to simplify things, the answer was no. But when the U.S. government wants to simplify things, you have no choice in the matter.