From an report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:
… To maintain accurate earnings information, SSA uses the earnings alert system to identify discrepancies between a recipient’s reported and actual wages. A discrepancy occurs when a recipient’s actual earnings differ from the earnings SSA used to calculate the SSI payment.
We identified 417,291 SSI recipients who had at least 1 pending earnings alert on their record as of September 2024. We randomly selected 100 of these recipients to determine whether SSA took appropriate action to resolve the alerts.
SSA employees resolved earnings alerts for 20 of the 100 recipients we reviewed. However, Agency employees did not resolve earnings alerts for 80 recipients who had at least 1 earnings alert pending as of September 2024.
- For 63 recipients SSA employees did not start reviews of 37 earnings alerts and did not complete their reviews of 26 earnings alerts. As of April 2025, the 63 earnings alerts remained pending.
- For 17 recipients, SSA employees cleared the earnings alerts but did not verify and record all earnings that affected the SSI payment amounts.. their reviews of 26 earnings alerts. As of April 2025, the 63 earnings alerts remained pending. …
Based on our sample results, we estimate SSA paid about 333,800 recipients approximately $1 billion that they would not have been eligible to receive had the Agency properly considered and fully developed their unreported earnings when it determined their SSI eligibility and associated payment amounts. .
8 comments:
I suggest that Michelle Anderson
Assistant Inspector General for Audit as First Assistant come down from her ivory tower and help out SSI earnings discrepancies. It’s easy to criticize from the sidelines especially when the agency has lost thousands of employees. I wonder if the DOGE debacle was mentioned in the report?
A Billion mis-spent - that should catch someone's eye.
That's what happens when SSA employees (that have knowledge, experience, and care) cannot do the work that is important; but has to spend time on "made-up-stuff based upon leadership that 'does not know, but think they do' and directs resources on those crazy ideas only because they have the authority!" The leadership should rely on the SSA employees that know, have experience, and do the important work.
Weird that fn 14 says the overpayment amount reported includes both overpayments and underpayments...why not break them out separately?
Another way to solve this problem is for Congress to change the laws. Increase the earned income exclusion so people can make more money without it affecting their SSI. Or create annual certifications instead of changing SSI every month. The folks on SSI I know who work end up with different benefits each month and constant over and underpayments; even if you're in PIE, if you earn $492 one month and $388 the next month and $516 the month after that, SSA is always behind on fixing things. And when the amounts are more like $1900, $2200, $800, $1100, etc. it's even worse because the SSI gets suspended and has to be turned back on, Medicaid shifts to 1619b and back...it's incredibly inefficient. I don't know how big the discrepancies were in the alerts versus the self-reported income; my guess is these are differences in gross v. net, 2 paychecks in a month vs. 3, sick leave vs. hours worked and many of them led to minimal changes in benefits. The constant over- and under-payments are themselves a work disincentive, and dealing with them takes SSA staff time away from other workloads.
Why isn’t this alleged great technology helping out the SSA employees?
Artificial intelligence is helping to fuel more effective benefits fraud, according to a top official with the Social Security Administration’s watchdog, but federal agencies should also leverage the new technologies to better deter would-be scammers from pilfering government funds.
I would absolutely love to work those tickles to match wages up, but im to busy covering reception due to the lack of staff and then on top of that being assigned to the 1800 # to schedule appointments 1 day a week. Kind of hard to do my job when im doing other jobs.
I mean when you make the program so tedious and convoluted where the benefit amount changes on a month-to-month-to-month basis of course there’s going to be many discrepancies. And of course the employee is going to be so overworked to deal with it.
Congress likes to complain about SSI wait times and overpayments but do nothing to simplify it.
It effects the trust and can not be captured for administrative expenses. Compared to the combined trust and annual FICA, 1 Billion is a rounding error.
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