Mr Nguyen went to an Office of the Gulf Coast claims plant, which Fund was set up 20 billion dollars to the management of BP for coastal businesses and citizens.
He was told he could not claim file. A law firm, which he had never heard of, had filed already one in his name.
He said "I never someone registered,".
In the six months since Mr Nguyen, 43, in the balance between the law firm was and the claims to. He has received even a cent.
The 30,000 or so Vietnamese-Americans living along the Gulf Coast, from which many of their boats and bare hands have few resources outside of the, knowledge of the life at the mercy of nature. But she were a year this week began learning a far more frustrating type of vulnerability: setting of work through an energy giant, they turned for help to a claims system, which many found that non-transparent and unresponsive.
For people in Mr. Nguyen situation, and it is impossible to know how many others are the disorientation was particularly deep, caught as they found themselves in a legal process, the not even then.
As Mr Nguyen claim some that she never signed with lawyers, but found that claims had been filed on their behalf (about 50 people formal complaints to the claims made investment in this direction).
Others along the coast said that she had passed through financial records on people, which them promised quickly and for free financial aid, only later to discover that she had actually hired a lawyer.
And then there are those, such as Tam Tran, a 59-year-old Oyster Shucker. He said, that he was for the medical care of the application was he misled been in application for a lawyer of a woman, who asked him. In the process of trying out this lawyer, free himself, Mr Tran said he found that he was also a client of another.
Discover the problem, as Mr Tran have learned, can only start, what to months back and forth between the company and the applicant often badly in need of money from the system frozen of the Gulf Coast claims institution, while the be.
Kenneth R. Feinberg, that system manages the claims, said that such cases "where that claims lawyer, representing the plaintiffs and the plaintiff denies it," "a barrier to efficiency and speed of always checks from." had created
Mr. Feinberg said "The G.C.C.F. ever has, address this problem,".
Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents, frustrated by the process, tried active legal assistance for their claims for the loss of income or damage to property. In return for their efforts in obtaining a satisfactory claim lawyers take settlement part of the recovery, although many involved in the BP litigation they say not for the no documentation quick-pay settlement fees are. Customers who are to give the claims process for a fight in the courts a wait longer and come away with nothing, the risk, but they have a chance, a much larger withdrawal.
A challenge of mass litigation is the thousands matching, search the workaround with the companies, large companies have the experience and resources to battle. Clients are often referred these companies with local lawyers, which, in turn, can rent to contractors that can announce the company rent and runners work as a translator.
In cases where it a breakdown seems to have been the one - with Mr. Nguyen, the as a client of a lawyer named Mikal C. Watts, and to his other surprise, as a Louisiana Shrimper and not as a Mississippi shipyard worker found, as - is it difficult to know where the breakdown occurred.
Last summer and fall, many Vietnamese households - including some who say that they were not even by the oil spill - received letters from Mr Watts, of San Antonio signed. The letters, Vietnamese, treated some of the recipients by name and others as: "Dear customer." The letter directed people, their financial records to send and added, "not none of BP or someone else other than Watt Guerra sign trade," the name of the company.
Transocean