The objective of our audit was to determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) accurately paid authorized fees to attorneys and non-attorney representatives (referred to collectively as representatives) for Title XVI claims, through its One-Time Payment system. ...I am not seeing anything like this sort of error rate in my fees. Maybe the local field offices I am dealing with are doing a much better job than is the case nationally.
We reviewed 250 randomly selected Title XVI claimant representative fee payments issued through SSA’s One-Time Payment system during the 2-year period July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009. ...
In total, 95 (38 percent) of the 250 randomly sampled Title XVI claimant representative fees had payment errors totaling $68,532. Projecting our sample results to the population, we estimate that approximately 10,306 fees had about $7.4 million in payment errors during the period July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009. ...
Of the 82 overpayment errors, 44 (54 percent) occurred because SSA employees did not properly offset the Title II benefits. Additional overpayments occurred when SSA employees did not always consider the Title II attorney fee amount previously paid, resulting in combined Title XVI and II fees that exceeded the applicable fee limit.
Dec 4, 2010
Errors In SSI Attorney Fee Payments
From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):
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The automated computation of windfall offset does NOT take into account attorney fees paid out of Title II retroactive benefits despite protestations to the contrary. When Title XVI payments are made for same first few months as Title II (i.e. months from which attorney fees are netted out), the field office is required to manually compute the proper offset to take into account the attorney fees. This is rarely done. This will result in an underpayment of Title XVI attorney fees, or, if a large Title II attorney fee was paid, can result in an overestimation of the windfall offset and an underpayment to the Title XVI beneficiary. It's been this way for over twenty years. Probably happens in about ohhhh 38% of the cases.
If inputs are done correctly and in the right order and there are no systems exceptions, the automated offset comp does take Title II fees into consideration. On the SSID it is shown as type U income and reduces the type W.
I do agree that historically this has not been done correctly and not only has the offset been too high, the Title XVI attorney fees have been too high. But again, if the inputs are done at the right time and in the right order (and there are no exceptions) both fees and offset can automate correctly. Unfortunately, we still have errors.
This is from a TXVI TE who has been doing windfall offsets since around 1981, starting with doing it all manually (with a calculator) to the wonderful automated systems we have now.
So, would not the rep. know that he or she was overpaid? And none returned the overpayment? Not even one? Just call them Diogenes.
Last year I returned $5,600 to SSA due to errors they committed in my attorney fees. This year I have sent back over $6,000. And we are paying a user fee to cover the costs of sending us our fees? I don't think we are getting our monies worth and neither is SSA according to the report.
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