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.
9 comments:
Really not bad at all. Field office workers get it right well over half the time. And only about 10,000 errant payments. There’s like 300 million people in the country. This shows the criticism of SSA workers and their leaders is exaggerated.
Isn’t it nice to be an Inspector General and live in an Ivory Tower. This agency has lost 7000 employees and funding has fallen yet this administration is expecting perfection? Gee, I wondered how this economy is working out these days? ⛽️
Backlogs are killing SSA twice on this issue.
1: Taking care of the backlog will severely reduce the need for CPS payments in the first place.
2: Once a CPS is issued, processing centers would ideally be free to jump on that case right away, both to complete the manual adjustment needed as well as correct the primary issue which caused the need for the payment.
Maybe hiring more staff would be a cost-effective way of preventing these payment errors?
62% accuracy is terrible, but not surprising in the current environment. This is what happens when you are at bare bones staffing-wise, have no time for training, push for quantity over quality, put people on the phones instead of allowing them to do their actual job. I expect for more stats to look like this to be honest.
The only surprise I have is that leadership didn’t try to fudge numbers or come out and say that we are doing the greatest job we have ever done in the history of the agency.
The only way this agency can be helped is through divine intervention…
I would suspect a majority of the field initiated cases did not have the problem deductions because we know that PC messes up the post payment review. Nearly every CPS I have issued and deducted the Medicare premium the PC does not end up applying that deduction towards Medicare. So once they get benefits turned back on they end up deducting the Medicare premiums from the first payment. Often months worth at a time. So we’ve learned just to pay the full amount and advise the claimant to set aside the amount. Because otherwise it is another couple months later before the premium issue gets fixed.
I wish OIG would study situations where people requested critical payments and the requests were denied/not processed. Also where people go to field offices because they aren't in pay, indicate they are in dire straits, but don't say the magic words of "critical payments" and thus don't get any help. Talk about underpayments!
I like how you folks are blaming this on the current situation and administration. You failed to notice this was based on 2023. But, hey, who am I to argue against the position that everything was roses before Trump and Bisignano came along.
This is why the numbers were not cooked. It would be interesting to see current stats and do a comparison.
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