The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) has issued a report on representative payees at Social Security. Here are the recommendations:
- SSA [Social Security Administration] should expand its recent efforts to identify cases with the greatest risk of misuse by making greater use of available data, in order to target selection and monitoring activities in the most efficient way.
- SSA should establish criteria for data-driven selection and monitoring of representative payees. The agency is legally required to obtain from representative payees an annual accounting for benefit payments. It should develop a data-driven approach to obtain those accountings in a way that is tailored to different risk groups.
- SSA should increase its efforts to avoid selecting as payees people or organization that have interests which conflict with the best interests of the vulnerable beneficiaries whom they would be serving.
- SSA should implement an annual quality review sample of its payee activities, including capability determinations, payee selections, and misuse determinations.
- SSA’s Inspector General should annually review a sample of site visits to organizational payees to ensure that those visits are effective in preventing misuse and ensuring compliance with SSA policies.
- SSA’s Inspector General should examine a sample of beneficiaries with fee-for-service payees to see how the payee’s fee impacts meeting the beneficiaries’ food, shelter, and personal needs.
- SSA should take steps to improve coordination and establish automated data exchanges with other agencies that also serve SSA’s beneficiaries. There are numerous agencies that use payees or other fiduciaries or that provide protective services. The Veterans Administration, state courts, state Adult Protective Service agencies, Protection and Advocacy agencies for people with disabilities, and state foster care agencies all serve populations that include SSA beneficiaries. Improved coordination and data exchanges can better protect the people that each agency serves.
3 comments:
I would agree to some extent, some of these rep payees are far less responsible than the claimants, but is this sort of thing really a wise use of resources? It would seem that there are other areas of deficiency SSA needs to concentrate on first, like correct calculations and timely actions from the payment center, which seem to be the bane of my existence.
SSA should absolutely have better oversight of, and control over, its rep payee workload. Not gonna happen--no staff. There are so many other workloads going undone that rep payee concerns are near the bottom of the list. There is no fiscal payback as there is in Redeterminations or CDR's. Another pie in the sky proposal going nowhere.
The other big problem with rep payee misuse is the problem with trying to prove there is misuse and then trying to collect the misused funds from the errant payee. Unless they are getting benefits themselves or volunteer to repay, SSA has very little recourse in the short term to collect the money and make sure it gets to the recipient.
Also, if a CR starts developing misuse, the all-important work unit system only gives work credit if the CR finds that there IS misuse. An investigation that concludes there is no misuse creates no work units and therefore, no work done by the employee, according to the powers above.
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