Critical Payment Errors

      From a report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:

An SSA employee initiates a critical payment when an Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance beneficiary or representative payee alerts SSA of a critical case or special situation when SSA is not paying regular monthly benefits, additional benefits are due, or a beneficiary reports they did not receive a monthly benefit. These include dire need, court orders, legislative mandates, and preliminary and expedited payments. …

We reviewed a random sample of 175 critical payments from a population of 3,549 issued in Fiscal Year 2023 …

We estimate SSA employees accurately processed about 44,000 (62 percent) of the 70,980 critical payments and did not accurately process about 27,000 (38 percent)—making over 28,000 errors when they processed the payments. About 2,800 of these errors resulted in the payments being incorrectly documented on beneficiaries’ records. For the remaining errors, we estimate the following. 

• Field office employees improperly paid approximately 6,900 beneficiaries about $1 million, but processing center employees identified the special situations and deductions from payment calculations during their post-payment review and adjusted future benefits due. 

•  About 8,100 of these errors resulted in SSA improperly paying beneficiaries $12 million because employees did not accurately adjust beneficiary records.

• SSA issued approximately 10,500 beneficiaries a Form SSA-1099, Social Security Benefit Statement, with a benefit total that was over- or understated by about $14 million because employees did not manually adjust records for replacement checks. …