From a report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:
… When SSA identifies an underpayment of $1 or more, it issues the underpayment to the recipient, or an eligible survivor if the recipient is deceased, after it offsets any outstanding overpayments, Interim Assistance reimbursements, and authorized representative fees.
For large underpayments, employees must conduct and document a pre-payment review before they release a payment.
We identified 2 populations: Population 1 comprised 2.5 million underpayments pending on the Supplemental Security Record as of September 2024 and Population 2 comprised 2.4 million underpayments SSA paid between
Of the 160 pending underpayments in Population 1, SSA paid 80 SSI recipients (50 percent) the underpayments they were due when required. However, SSA employees did not follow policy to ensure the SSA paid 69 recipients (43 percent) the underpayments they were due. The remaining 11 (7 percent) were incorrect underpayments that should be removed from the records.
Additionally, of the 80 underpayments for deceased recipients in Population 1, we identified 47 underpayments, totaling $22,861, that remained on SSA’s records even though they were not payable to anyone.
Of the 100 underpayments in Population 2, SSA paid 88 SSI recipients (88 percent) the underpayments they were due and conducted pre-payment reviews for them when required. We did not find evidence SSA employees followed policy and conducted
pre-payment reviews for the remaining 12 (12 percent) underpayments, as required. Of the 2.5 million underpayments that were pending as of September 2024, we estimate SSA did not pay 1.1 million underpayments, totaling about $291 million, that were owed to SSI recipients. …
17 comments:
This is what happens when DOGE comes in with a chainsaw and drives out knowledgeable employees to other jobs or retirement. By the way, where is my $2000 DOGE check?
SSA is not emphasizing training enough these days. Employees are being rewarded for clearances not quality. Changes need to start from the top.
Anyone else getting tired of them blaming DOGE for everything? Take some responsibility. You have been thoroughly trained and provided with excellent resources. Pay is very good, especially since most people don’t have impressive degrees. Now start getting it right.
Are you one of those paid influencers that work for the government? This is SSA not the Department of Defense.
That’s some poor logic my friend— “You have been thoroughly trained and provided with excellent resources”. Faulty premise is wrong wrong wrong all day. The ones not taking responsibility are the feckless mgmt class running the show.
They prefer browbeating over leadership -I don’t need an “impressive degree” to know that fact.
Everything you said is 100% false and ignorant.
No , DOGE did immeasurable damage to SSA , among other agencies. History will not be kind to anyone involved in allowing or facilitating that.
An example of another agency with a smaller workforce.
IRS audit revenue fell sharply last year after the Trump administration cut the agency’s workforce.
The IRS lost roughly 30% of its audit staff, and as a result, lost 35%, or $3.5 billion in revenue from taxes already owed.
@11:10AM. No, not tired. It's a big reason why the agency is in the state it's in.
Really? It does not matter how much expertise an individual worker has, if there are not enough workers to do the work. DRP decimated SSA, literally. Not to mention the executives forced into retirement because Dudeck and DOGE wanted to take ill-considered, illegal, or immoral action.
@ 11:10 Yes, I also definitely am tired of people blaming everything on DOGE. But I think you underestimate the complexity of the workload and issues typical Social Security field office employees have to deal with. That’s without even considering time pressures because of understaffing or because employees have largely been shifted to answering phones. I worked at the hearing level, with thousands of highly educated, well-paid attorneys/judges, and to me it seemed like we had it easy compared to field office employees. Not only in terms of the wear and tear of dealing with the public, but the actual intellectual demands of the field office jobs compared to attorneys or judges at the hearing level.
Someone walks up to a window in a field office and they might ask almost anything. Take a relatively common issue like the effect of work on disability, or SSI income and resource limits. Those are highly complex issues depending on multiple factors. To thoroughly and accurately explain all of the implications of those situations to someone who might be of any educational level and possibly have a language barrier on top of that, on the spot, in a short amount of time, with dozens more people waiting, is a real challenge. To me that seems a lot harder than dealing with essentially the same issue – disability and the sequential evaluation– in 90% of your cases, and having some time to review and prepare, and having a staff of attorneys and clericals ready to help you both before and after the hearing. Even the good judges and attorneys at OHO struggled with non-disability issues of the type field offices see every day. I saw many a mangled decision on those issues. It was a rare judge or writer who was adept at reading the various system queries relevant to overpayments, for instance. Often it was a rubber stamp of what the field office had done, leaving the claimant at the hearing feeling very unsatisfied.
So blithely saying “you’ve been trained” and blaming employees is not a serious position. There is blame to be directed at SSA, but it should be at the executives who have been running the organization for decades, not the front-line employees. Actual creative, innovative solutions to the big organizational problems have been few and far between. The lack of reasonably up-to-date software solutions, for instance, falls on the back of the front line employees.
No!
This is certainly an undercount of how much SSI recipients are owed, because it only considers the underpayments SSA has already put on peoples' records. There are many situations where someone should be paid more SSI than they are getting, and SSA doesn't realize it. Just a few examples I've seen in the past year:
* underpayments taken for overpayment recovery while there are pending waiver requests or wrongfully denied waiver requests
* Title II benefits listed twice on a record so the person's concurrent SSI claim is denied
* failure to take an SSI claim when someone expresses intent to file on question 24 of the SSDI or retirement application
* failure to process statutory benefit continuation requests in CDR cases (also talking people out of SBC by giving them incomplete/slanted information)
* incorrect application of ISM rules, especially related to public assistance households
* incorrect reading of child support documents and incorrect application of policy on how child support affects a child's SSI
* failure to reopen prior claims when a new SSI claim was filed within a year of the initial denial (and an explicit request to reopen was made, not that this is necessary)
These are all situations where no underpayment will appear on SSA's systems and yet, with advocacy and a properly trained/resourced SSA employee, a low-income elderly or disabled person can get additional money. I wish Congress made SSI a lot easier for SSA to administer, and gave SSA enough money to improve its systems and hire and train and supervise more staff. SSI's problems are not solely SSA's fault. But SSI's problems are hurting real people, and the costs get pushed out onto the health care, criminal justice, homeless services, and other public benefits systems.
“I wish Congress made SSI a lot easier for SSA to administer, and gave SSA enough money to improve its systems and hire and train and supervise more staff.“
Most of the population agrees with you. Unfortunately it seems most of them are also too stupid to stop voting for the very Congresspeople who inject unnecessary complexity and starve the agency for the express purpose of making it harder for the poor to get the help they need and saving billionaires a few more dollars.
Underpayment releases should be automated, not human dependent. We complete the underpayment review, we don’t need to do another one 6 months later. How many of those underpayments involved dedicated accounts? How many of those dedicated accounts required additional documentation because mommy or daddy or auntie spent the money inappropriately, or closed the dedicated account. Most of us are now spending 40 percent more time answering phone calls, and not having time to work the U2, U4 lists we should and could be reviewing.
I take pride in my work and feel horrible if I identify a case that has had an .underpayment for more than a year on it- as I am sure a lot of workers are.
Want to resolve these issue? Get us more workers, and off the phones so we can do the work we should be doing.
SSI underpayment processing has never been a priority item even in prior administrations. SSI OP processing is always looked at weekly. Even processing of Windfall offset takes months on end with no priority. This is an element of Management lack of oversight in a majority of offfices even when there was more staff available.
There’s so much more to this story. First, let’s acknowledge tremendous work was done in 2024 to address overdue underpayments and reduce their occurrence. Millions of long overdue payments were reviewed and released by hardworking field office employees. Policy and the SSI system were updated to increase the dollar amount at which a large underpayment requires a peer review (had not been updated in three decades) - as a result, far more underpayments can now be automated (and in truth most smaller underpayments are automated). We improved the process for releasing additional underpayment (in advance of the next regular scheduled installment). Training emphasized policies that were sometimes overlooked or little understood.
All of that happened under O’Malley, and was part of SSA’s work to improve both under- and overpayment processing. More work is needed in improving the system to automate underpayments across multiple records (for people with complex records). And legislation is needed to put the onerous dedicated account law in the past once and for all!
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