Understaffing Costs Money

From an audit report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Our objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) evaluated earnings reported to the Master Earnings File (MEF) for disabled individuals receiving Title II benefits. ...

In our July 2004 report, Disabled Title II Beneficiaries with Earnings Reported on the Master Earnings File, we stated that SSA did not evaluate all earnings reported to the MEF between 1996 and 2000 for disabled individuals receiving Title II benefits as of March 2002. We estimated that approximately $1.37 billion in overpayments resulting from about 63,000 disabled beneficiaries’ work activity was not identified.

To perform our follow-up review, we identified 25,904 disabled beneficiaries (from 1 Social Security number segment) who were receiving Title II benefits as of July 2007 and had earnings reported on the MEF between 2001 and 2006 that may impact their entitlement to benefits. ...

Based on our review, we estimate that approximately $3.1 billion was overpaid to about 173,000 disabled beneficiaries because of work activity. Although the Agency identified about $1.8 billion of these overpayments to approximately 141,000 beneficiaries, we estimate about $1.3 billion in overpayments to approximately 49,000 beneficiaries went undetected by SSA. ...

We recognize SSA’s efforts to improve the work-related CDR process. In addition, we acknowledge the Agency’s limited resources with which to perform this workload. However, we believe SSA may achieve greater savings in the long-term if it could provide the resources to perform more work-related CDRs.