SSA suspends benefit payments for a variety of reasons. Suspending benefits stops ongoing monthly payments, and SSA technicians receive alerts to resolve the reason for the suspension. However, SSA does not initiate actions to recover payments made after a beneficiary’s death until technicians add death information and terminate the payment record.
We identified three populations of beneficiaries who were in suspended payment status as of December 2019. We used death data from 24 States to identify approximately 5,000 beneficiaries in suspended payment status who were deceased according to State death records. We then identified about 6,000 beneficiaries suspended for development of unverified death reports. Finally, we used data analytics to identify approximately 23,000 beneficiaries suspended for address development who we determined were likely deceased. We randomly selected and reviewed 100 beneficiaries from each of the three populations (300 total).
Findings
We determined 263 (88 percent) of the 300 sampled beneficiaries in suspended payment status had died before December 2019. These deceased beneficiaries remained in suspended payment status because SSA (1) technicians did not follow existing policy for beneficiaries suspended for death development, (2) did not have adequate controls to identify beneficiaries suspended for address development who were likely deceased, and (3) policy does not consistently instruct technicians to search for or recognize all available sources of death information. Additionally, SSA policy does not provide sufficient information to guide technicians when they post a beneficiary’s unverified death based on a returned payment from Treasury, which results in erroneous dates of death on SSA records.
Because of these control weaknesses, we estimate SSA issued approximately $298 million in payments to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status. SSA did not initiate actions to recover these payments, but it did receive approximately $84 million in recovered funds. SSA erroneously recorded about $33 million of the returned funds as underpayments. We estimate SSA has neither recovered approximately $214 million of the payments nor recorded approximately 24,000 beneficiaries’ death information in the Numident. ...
Note that there is literally zero concern expressed over the fact that Social Security suspended payments to people who were still alive based upon unverified death reports. In fact, OIG is eager to have Social Security cut off benefits to many more people whom they regard as "likely" dead even though some of them are certainly alive. Would "likely" be a high enough standard for you if one of your loved ones got cut off benefits because some bureaucrat thought they were "likely" dead even though they were very much alive? Remember that when Social Security decides you’re dead, you don’t just lose your cash benefits, you lose your Medicare and all your bank accounts and credit cards are frozen.
8 comments:
cluck, cluck
First, you linked to the report on your computer, here is the live link:
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-08-19-50800.pdf
Second, the report focused on only those that had been suspended for MORE than 1 year and involved payments returned by financial institutions or first-/third-party reports of death. SSA was NOT randomly stopping benefits based on allegations for these cases as the beneficiary had already gone a year without benefits. As the reason for returned payments was 'death' from the financial institution, SSA should have suspended for death development and not address development. That is the main processing failure.
A similar audit was done for disabled beneficiaries in suspense for address development, miscellaneous reasons or whereabouts unknown. Those case usually involved incorrect reasons for suspense (e.g. should have been suspended for incarceration).
But what is SSA to do? It cannot knowingly send out payments to an bank that has reported a beneficiary as deceased. It will not be given a budget to have people go out in the field to locate these people.
Finally, it is the beneficiary's responsibility to keep SSA informed of proper payment information (bank changes, address changes) to receive benefits. It is not SSA's responsibility to hunt them down every time payment stops.
Another note--bank accounts aren't frozen by SSA but by the bank. Ditto for credit cards.
In my 20 years of experience, if somehow SSA cuts off someone's benefits for death and it is in error (most likely the widow input as dead vs the worker), the non deceased person or relatives contact SSA asap, probably similar to employees who do not receive their expected paycheck.
Automatic posting to bank, automatic payments for rent, phone, utilities, etc can all lead (theoretically) to payments to a dead person for years. And, if a relative has access to the bank account, there might be other charges to the account that could lead pne to believe someone is still alive, when they are deceased. On the other hand, anyone who has ever did geneology knows that there are extremely few unique names. That is why the SS number was invented in the first place! But, occassionally, two people with very similar names can have similar birthdays and even SS #s. This can be a real problem if you declare the wrong Thomas Edward Brady dead! I use this as an example, because ESPN famously found 12 other Tom Bradys living in Boston. Someting like 5 of them had Edward as a middle name and two also had Patrick as a "second middle name," just like the Patriots' QB (at that time).
Good luck clearing that up on the phone.
@1205 There are in office appointments for someone to bring in documents to prove they are still alive.
This is pretty much more ridiculous behavior from the SSA. They want to get people off the money line anyway they can.
@1223 If someone's checks are suspended for death and they don't contact SSA within a year, what's ridiculous about stopping them permanently?
If someone is reported deceased in error (I have most often seen this when the wage earner and widow are both input as deceased instead of just the wage earner) the widow can come to an office (appointments are available for this) show ID to prove she's alive and have her benefits reinstated. Mistakes are made either by SSA or by someone reporting a death but the person can have their checks reinstated fairly quickly.
I am good with it.
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