I will take a guess at what happened. It was what I call a "phantom windfall offset." The field office took a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claim and quickly denied it because the claimant had too much income. However, once the Disability Insurance Benefits claim was approved, the SSI claim held up payment of back benefits, because Social Security's computers would not allow payment of the back Disability Insurance Benefits until the amount of the SSI payments were known, so what is called the windfall offset could be done. Of course, since no SSI benefits were being paid, there was no SSI payment information, so the back benefits were not paid. I sometimes wonder if the back benefits ever get paid in these situations if no one complains.
Social Security is well aware of the "phantom windfall offset" problem. IIt eats up a lot of staff time and delays benefits payments for a lot of people. Is Social Security doing anything about it?
Does anyone else have a theory about what happened here?
Social Security is well aware of the "phantom windfall offset" problem. IIt eats up a lot of staff time and delays benefits payments for a lot of people. Is Social Security doing anything about it?
Does anyone else have a theory about what happened here?
It is either a failure of the SSI claims representative not notifying the Social Security claims representative that the SSI claim was technically denied OR the Social Security claims representative knew that SSI was denied technically and failed to remove the windfall offset indicator. (In many offices the claims would have been processed by the same claims representaive.)
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