... Marriage can impact a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) beneficiary’s payment. We randomly selected 1 of 20 segments from the Supplemental Security Record (SSR) and Master Beneficiary Record (MBR). We identified 3 populations with name changes and sampled 250 individuals ...
SSA did not always take the necessary manual actions to properly update 38 of the 250 payment records for SSI recipients or OASDI beneficiaries when there was a name change because of marriage. Furthermore, SSA had not taken manual action on 11 SSI recipients or OASDI beneficiaries who changed their name via the iSSNRC application. We estimate SSA improperly paid 16,631 SSI recipients and OASDI beneficiaries approximately $240.9 million when there was a name change because of marriage. ...
When a person changes their name, SSA systems do not automatically determine whether they are receiving benefits. SSA does not know about a marriage until an individual reports it. ...
SSA explored the feasibility of using electronic marriage data to determine if OASDI beneficiaries changed their marital status. However, not all states/jurisdictions have a central repository of electronic marriage data, and many do not require, or collect, the marriage applicants’ Social Security number. ...
There's a lot that Social Security could do to prevent overpayments if it had an adequate workforce. A different Inspector General might want to issue a report detailing how much money is being wasted due to inadequate staffing at the Social Security Administration.
By the way, there's also the question of whether marriage should have as many effects as it does on Social Security and SSI benefits but that's another topic.
14 comments:
For the years I worked at the agency, I always thought this was, one of the very many, stupid things about SSA systems. When you updated a name for marriage/divorce/name change, the system (for updating the name) would give you an alert to say "If this person receives benefits, yada yada yada, take manual action...". But this is wholly stupid, why does the main record (Numident- where the name change propagates once its made) not talk to the other records like the MBR or SSID and just update the name automatically? So so so stupid. Once the NUMI is updated, a person has to go in manually and change the MBR to the new name, which also updates Medicare (if Medicare is involved). Same with the SSID. WHY DO THESE SYSTEMS WITHIN THE SAME LEGACY SYSTEM, NOT TALK TO EACH OTHER. Good grief. It's just another layer (among many) of SSA turd systems that creates so much extra work for employees.
@11:08
...do you have any POMS reference to that alert, cause that is literally the facts of a case I'm working on.
https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110205105
Right off the public SSA website. That’s probably as close as you’ll get.
I'm going to posit that the name change is not propagated to T2 or T16 because they WANT you to check out the facts connected to the person and after, then change the name on the appropriate system(s). If the system actually made the name change on each subsystem, it's likely no employee would ever take a look at the case nor review the situation.
2:00pm
Perhaps. But that's just as silly as not updating it. Update the record automatically and have the system auto post a tickle to the record for development follow-up to see if any material changes need to occur. It's not a hard concept to grasp, honestly. Right now the action is "hope the person doing the name change actually manually changes the record at all and if they don't care to change the record manually, they sure as hell don't care enough to do any further development."
@1:56
Thanks!
3:11pm. Interesting how we look at the same situation 180 degrees apart. I see the situation as a lead requiring further development (using the name change action as the action to be taken after the contact) and you see it as an action that the system can do, with the lead and research into impact on benefits as more secondary. I read the POMS as more supportive of my point of view. Likely why the system doesn't do it automatically via interface.
3:11pm
Clearly you're missing the point and my assumption is you've never worked in an FO (and if so, especially not in the current climate). Employees don't need any more manual tasks than they already have, that's why the workload is so overwhelming and errors are so high. Thousands of name changes are processed daily. The more automated the process becomes, the less error prone it becomes as humans cause errors a lot more than coded algorithms. The POMS doesn't agree with you, it's written that way because the current process is manual. If it were automated tomorrow, the POMS would be updated to reflect that change. HQ Systems and Policy are lazy (and/or inept), which is why a lot of processes that should be automated, still are not.
4:23pm - your assumptions (re: me and others) are wrong and we disagree. So be it.
@ 3:11 you are wholly mistaken. It’s not an inept or lazy decision keeping this a manual process. It’s specifically because of the last paragraph of the POMS. Name change/ marriage is a material breakpoint for both T2 and T16 and requires not only review by an SSA employee but specifically in many cases a CS. Updating other records means there is entitlement and marriage is always a material factor to entitlement. If someone is receiving SSI marriage can prompt and RZ or at minimum an LA change or even record composition change, all of which require manual decision making. If someone is receiving T2, it has to be investigated as well for potential changes to current entitlement on prior records etc. Merely changing the last name on the SSID doesn’t actually change the eligibility requirements and sets people up for overpayments.
11:35 here. My comment was more so directed at 4:23
I currently am working on a case where a claimant age 70, was receiving (we think) benefits on her first husbands record (She may have been getting a partial benefit on her own earnings but we cannot tell) . She then remarried and went to the local office to register a name change.
Three years latter, she found out she might be able to get a higher benefit on her new husband's record. She is now getting those benefits but the was also told that she had been overpaid benefits that were received on H one for the entire time after her marriage until the new benefits could start on H 2.
If the District Office had done its job, when she went in for the name change, they would have then terminated her benefits on H 1 and there would have been no overpayment. She could have started to receive benefits on H 2 once she met the duration requirement (nine months)
Just an other illustration of how the SSA fails to properly advise people who come in for help.
@11:16
12:25 here. Yup, that's almost exactly the same as the case I have, except it was around a decade where SSA was informed of the re-marriage, did not terminate on ex-spouse and did not initiate on current spouse. It didn't make a huge financial difference, and given recipient had informed SSA of the marriage, they thought the switch was made. But less than $100/month in difference, adds up a lot after a decade.
I've had those kinds of cases before too, usually because a CSR changed the name without asking whether the person was either entitled or was serving as a payee.
Married/remarried DACs and remarried people entitled to child in care, and/or divorced spouses are have always been recurrent problems.
Management claims the coming T2 redesign will solve this. I predict that management must be smoking the good stuff in their high tower offices and blowing the smoke out of their arses.
We'll see who is correct in the long run. Based upon my experience, it won't be them....
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