From the Detroit Free Press:
... In an odd quirk, Social Security finally acknowledged in early August that a glitch caused the agency to send out some incorrect "On Request" paper statements. The troubled reports were triggered if you asked for information on your Social Security account via a paper form, known as an SSA-7004.
"Of the tens of thousands of paper requests the agency receives annually, less than 1% of those statements issued contained errors," according to an email from Mark Hinkle, acting press officer in the national Social Security office. ...
Social Security said a coding issue caused errors on a very small number of the "On Request" statements that were issued since 2017. Hinkle said the statements displayed the correct estimated benefit amounts but the mistakes were made when the projected benefits were applied to incorrect ages at which the person would receive them. ...
In the case listed in detail, what appears to have happened was that the person indicated that he or she planned to retire at age 66, so using that, the system calculated benefits (correctly, I think) if the person started taking benefits at age 66, the FRA (66 years 4 months) and 70. The FRA number was labeled correctly. However, the age 66 number was labeled 62 and the age 70 number was labeled 66.
ReplyDeleteSince the article indicates that the problem only happened to people over 62, the problem was probably that the program printed an age 62 value for people under 62, but not for people over 62, and the program didn't figure the age correctly. So it printed 62 for the first estimate and 66 for the second instead of 66 for the first and 70 for the second (the FRA number I guess is printed in another part of the program).