From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):
... Children may receive benefits if they are younger than age 18 and their parent is entitled to Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance benefits. They may also qualify for benefits if they are 18 and older when they are a student at an elementary or secondary school.
To be entitled to student benefits, beneficiaries must attend an educational institution full-time (at least 20 hours per week) and be age 19 and 2 months or younger. Student benefits cease either the month after the student stops attending school full-time or when the student attains age 19 and 2 months, whichever is sooner.
We identified 16,632 beneficiaries who were entitled as children and placed in terminated payment status when they reached age 18; however, SSA recorded they remained full-time students past the termination month on the benefit record.
SSA did not have adequate controls to ensure children who reached age 18 and still attended school received benefits. SSA did not properly continue benefits for 87 of the 100 students in our sample once they reached age 18, which resulted in $357,872 in underpayments. Based on our sample results, we estimate SSA underpaid 14,470 beneficiaries approximately $59.5 million.
We concluded SSA employees incorrectly input student information on beneficiaries’ records while using the Post Entitlement Online System and Modernized Claims System. This resulted in the termination of benefits for students aged 18 despite evidence of their continuing student enrollment. Further, SSA’s Title II Redesign System generally did not create alerts instructing SSA employees to determine whether students were still due benefits past age 18. ...
I understand that this report may be attracting media attention. It should. This is poor performance.
Update: I said this was attracting media attention. Turns out it's started even sooner than I thought. Joe Davidson at the Washington Post has a piece out on the problem.
6 comments:
Here's another example of underpaid children. It deals with disabled children. Children who are disabled but unable to be entitled because a parent is not yet retired, dead or disabled. Instead, the child manages to become entitled to minimal SSDI on their own record based on earnings usually from a sheltered workshop. Then many years later when one or both parents retire, die, or become disabled no one files for disabled child's benefits often because the disabled child in not living with the parent. Many times the child is also receiving SSID and thus someone at SSA should be checking for disabled child's benefits when the SSID is redetermined.
I’ll look through the report when I get a chance. I have no doubt improvement is necessary. However, after being in the field for a while, does it mention how many times the payees or students get the autogenerated school enrollment form and fail to return it and then come in wondering why the benefits stopped at age 18? That happens a lot.
Hopefully this will illicit some positive change for how things are done internally at SSA. If you don’t work for the agency, you have no idea how time consuming and convoluted our inputs are for workloads. So much so that mistakes are the norm and not the exception on certain things. Especially since good training is practically non-existent.
For example, the person doing the student input workload for our office is a temporary hire, so no “official” training at all. It’s a wonder anything gets done correctly anymore.
@ 7:52 am
Yes it would be wonderful if our antiquated system actually worked seamlessly and connected all the dots for us but it doesn’t.
Instead of just overhauling the entire system (which admittedly would be an enormous undertaking), the agency just “adds” newer systems as band aids. After a while you get what we have going on now which is a lot of individual programs that don’t integrate well together. It’s awesome!
Reports seems to focus only on data which SSA had on file already.
In this case, the problem is when the FO (or other components, but usually FO) will OVERKEY the existing student data instead of creating a NEW occurrence for the next school year.
This results in benefits terminating for the retro period and sometimes being picked up again at a later date. The students were already paid for the prior year, but OIG lists it as an underpayment while the record will show as an overpayment for payments previously issued but no longer due because of supporting data.
In short, no SSA is not screwing people over intentionally. It is just a terrible screen to input student information since it only displays one year at a time. This was brought up on a call a few months ago.
@ 1:46 pm
Yes, I’ve seen this a lot. Overlaying previous information instead creating a new occurrence.
Again, our systems are set up in a way that mistakes are frequent. Especially for those new to the job or those overwhelmed and not slowing down to ensure the right input is being made.
Yea ssa systems are old -why don’t they just allow beneficiaries to go online and if they are still in school to attest to the same under penalty clauses and have it continue ..
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