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. …
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?
ReplyDeleteAnyone 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.
DeleteAre you one of those paid influencers that work for the government? This is SSA not the Department of Defense.
DeleteThat’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.
DeleteThey prefer browbeating over leadership -I don’t need an “impressive degree” to know that fact.
Everything you said is 100% false and ignorant.
DeleteNo , DOGE did immeasurable damage to SSA , among other agencies. History will not be kind to anyone involved in allowing or facilitating that.
Delete@11:10AM. No, not tired. It's a big reason why the agency is in the state it's in.
DeleteReally? 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.
Delete@ 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.
DeleteSomeone 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!
DeleteSSA is not emphasizing training enough these days. Employees are being rewarded for clearances not quality. Changes need to start from the top.
ReplyDeleteAn example of another agency with a smaller workforce.
ReplyDeleteIRS 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.