From Fulcrum:
Social Security's inspector general opened its books this week and found a number that should stop any controller cold: roughly $1 billion in improper Supplemental Security Income payments, made to 333,800 recipients, sitting on top of a backlog the agency has known about for years. The cause was not a hacker, not a sophisticated fraud ring, and not a policy loophole. It was an earnings alert nobody closed out.
Here is how the mechanism actually works, and why it matters more than the headline figure. When a recipient's reported earnings change, the Social Security Administration's system generates an alert flagging that the payment amount may need adjustment. An employee is supposed to resolve that alert, verify the wage documentation, and correct the payment before the gap compounds. The inspector general's office pulled a sample of 100 such cases. Only 20 had been resolved. Sixty-three had gone untouched entirely, left pending for an average of 733 days, just over two years. Seventeen more were marked "cleared" without the wage documentation ever being fully verified, meaning the case was closed on paper while the underlying question remained open.
Multiply that failure rate across the full caseload and the agency's own auditors landed on 417,291 recipients with alerts still pending, and roughly $1 billion in resulting overpayments — $344 million of it still recoverable, and $664 million gone for good under the administrative finality rules that bar the agency from clawing back money once too much time has passed. That second figure is the one a controller would flag first. It is not merely money the government failed to collect. It is money the government forfeited its own legal right to ever collect, because the paperwork sat too long. …
Fulcrum assumes this happened because of lazy, incompetent government employees. Of course, most people reading this blog know that’s not the case. The problem is a lack of employees to do the work. Give the agency another 15,000 employees and problems like this start to get solved in a hurry. Continue along the current track of ratcheting down the number of agency employees and this sort of problem keeps getting worse.
Of course, the right has a solution for this. Devote whatever agency resources it takes to stamp out overpayments no matter what impact that has on those legitimately applying for and receiving SSI. If you believe that SSI shouldn’t exist in the first place, who cares whether those due benefits are paid those benefits? Those on the right only care about government benefits when it’s them or someone close to them who needs benefits. Them they’re stunned by how bad things are and often blame “them.” You know who “them” are: black and brown people, immigrants, etc. It’s a depressing part of Social Security and SSI.
