Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has done a study to determine the agency's accuracy rate in making the offset computations required when a recipient of disability insurance benefits from Social Security is also receiving workers compensation. This was a followup to a 2006 study. The earlier study showed a 17% error rate. This new study shows a 12% error rate which is a significant improvement but still far too high.
The report does not make clear who determined whether there was an error. I strongly doubt that OIG has anyone with the training and experience needed to spot all possible errors, especially errors when there is a lump sum settlement of a workers compensation case, a not uncommon situation. Without knowing more about how this study was done, I cannot say how meaningful it is.
In fairness to Social Security and OIG, workers compensation offset computations are complicated. There are reasons for the high error rate and reasons why OIG would have difficulty doing an audit.
The report does not make clear who determined whether there was an error. I strongly doubt that OIG has anyone with the training and experience needed to spot all possible errors, especially errors when there is a lump sum settlement of a workers compensation case, a not uncommon situation. Without knowing more about how this study was done, I cannot say how meaningful it is.
In fairness to Social Security and OIG, workers compensation offset computations are complicated. There are reasons for the high error rate and reasons why OIG would have difficulty doing an audit.
Get rid of it. It's so convoluted that it probably isn't worth the program savings.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it would help if we didn't have to do complicated calculations while answering the phone at the same time.
ReplyDelete