Many recipients of benefits paid by the Social Security Administration are eligible for more than one type of benefit. One example would be a widow entitled to retirement benefits based upon her own earnings and widows benefits based upon the earnings record of her late husband. If a representative payee is appointed to manage funds for the retirement benefits you'd think that the representative payee would also be managing the widows benefits. Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) did a recent study to determine whether Social Security was being consistent in paying benefits through representative payees in situations where claimants are eligible for more than one type of benefit. They found much inconsistency. Tens of millions of dollars a year are being paid directly to individuals whom the agency has already found to be incapable of handling money.
Or put differently, tens of millions of dollars each year are paid to representative payees for individuals the agency has already determined are capable of handling their own money.
ReplyDeleteAnother cherry picked OIG report. Charles, you often reference percentages of a problem, well in this case the percentage of cases in the SSA/RSI universe is very small and almost always caught. This applies to those on both SSA/SSI also. With 60 million folks out there receiving benefits SSA is doing great and all that they can. There will always be cases that fall through the cracks and will be found and fixed. OIG needs to concentrate on real fraud and crooks, overpayment recovery, etc.
ReplyDeleteOf all the problems that OIG could take a poke at. In the larger scheme of things, this is insignificant even within the realm of insignificant.
ReplyDeleteWhy aren't they writing reports about how SSA is 7-8 months behind on cashing remittance checks? How they are in some cases 4-5 months behind converting individuals from life to survivor rates when a spouse dies? How SSA's broken claims processing systems are literally fracturing under the strain of attempting to conduct business with the baby boomers?
The issue is that OIG knows where its bread is buttered - they will look at small fry stuff but ignore the major, major problems that are immediately obvious to anyone working within the agency with half a brain (i.e. anybody outside of senior management).
@ 6:42PM,
ReplyDeleteBravo!