Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released its Semiannual Report to Congress. In Fiscal Year 2014 OIG received 121,461 allegations, opened 8,335 cases and get 1,291 criminal convictions. This is for a program that pays benefits to 63.2 million people. Only 6% of the allegations had enough substance to be worthy of an investigation. Only about 1% of the allegations resulted in a conviction. Whatever fraud there is at Social Security should certainly be investigated and prosecuted but it's only a tiny, tiny part of Social Security.
6 comments:
hahahahaha....they ignore most of the fraud reported. I reported a case of a rep payee withholding benefits for a person, to the point that the person was homeless and getting no money, they reported back that they would not follow-up.
In our area, unless the fraud loss exceeds $35,000 OIG won't even touch it. And, even then, you aren't assured they will mess with it. It doesn't help that the US attorney is in a snit over agency policy of doing 100% withholding of benefits as restitution on conviction cases (i.e. none of that restitution at $50/mo crap the useless waste of space judges order).
Our little office has made over 10 referrals this year alone that weren't accepted. Some of them were pretty egregious things, too.
We are on the virge of giving up. Nobody cares, so why should we?
Charles you are mistaken. Last year's medicare non usage program review of people over 90 who had not been using their Medicare generated overpayments in excess of $100 million. Most of that will never be recovered because of fraud, lack of enforcement and follow up by SSA and OIG. Centenarian reviews the same.
Charles, the conclusions you draw do not reflect the reality of the levels of fraud in the programs SSA administers. My staff considers that the agency is not interested in identifying fraud except in the most extreme cases, let alone prosecuting fraud. We must spend our time processing claims, appeals, and PE actions. It is almost a full time job to investigate, document, refer and prosecute a single case. This has been going on for many, many years certainly for more than the 30 years I have worked for SSA. I could give examples of repeated failures to report wages in Title II or SSI even after repeated explanations of reporting responsibilities - but the people involved know that any over payments could very likely be reduced or waived for a variety of their allegations, with the worst that would happen is they have a very small amount withheld from future benefits if still eligible or placed as noncollectable if they are not eligible for payments.
Charles, I agree with you that fraud is not completely widespread. That being said, you must take this report with a grain of salt. OIG is a very small law enforcement unit compared to the beneficiary population. As stated above, I've encountered many instances of fraud in which OIG has declined to pursue because it was "not a big enough fish" to present to a U.S. attorney. It doesn't really bother me because if the agency/u.s. attorney does not care then i won't get upset about it. But there is more fraudulent activities going on out there that do not get put into this report simply because OIG does not have the manpower to do the investigation.
I am sorry to say but OIG does have the manpower.
With OIG being in every state almost..Think about what each of the agents in those states are doing.
Working in OIG for almost 5 years I realized I needed to leave after finding out they are just paper pushers.
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