From a report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:
… The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program provides monthly benefits to retired and disabled workers and their dependents as well as the survivors of deceased workers. The minor child of an insured worker may receive Social Securitybenefits until they reach age 18. A child beneficiary may continue receiving benefits after they reach age 18 if they qualify as a student beneficiary. …
We identified 521,393 beneficiaries who were entitled to student benefits for 1 or more months from January 2022 through December 2024. We randomly selected 100 of these beneficiaries to determine whether SSA accurately paid student benefits to eligible beneficiaries. Of the 100 beneficiaries we reviewed, SSA correctly paid benefits to 71 in accordance with policy. However, SSA did not correctly pay benefits to 17 beneficiaries. In addition, SSA did not retain documentation to support benefit payments to 12 beneficiaries. SSA did not correctly pay benefits to 17 beneficiaries as follows.
For nine, beneficiaries and school officials did not provide SSA accurate or current school attendance information that affected eligibility for student benefits, and SSA was unaware the information contained errors.
For eight, SSA employees did not correctly use available school attendance and graduation information to determine the duration of student benefit eligibility.
In addition, SSA employees did not retain completed Forms SSA-1372 for 12 of the 100 beneficiaries, as required. Without evidence, we could not determine whether the individual were entitled to the student benefits SSA paid them. As a result, SSA improperly paid beneficiaries $49,447 and could not support an additional $93,466 in benefit payments. Based on our sample results, we estimate SSA improperly paid approximately $211 million to about 89,000 beneficiaries. In addition, we estimate SSA made approximately $342 million in unsupported payments to about 63,000 student beneficiaries. …
9 comments:
SSA should upgrade their training schedule since much of the brain power left with the DOGE debacle. A better evaluation system for each employee should be mandatory since taxpayers money is not being properly dispersed. Management also should be held accountable if the error rates don’t improve.
Management gives out these glowing reports of their accomplishments but never mention the accuracy rate. The current formula at SSA is mass production over quality.
We get the job done. I don’t understand what the hell you complain about.
This report deals with the period prior to the current administration, but I think it’s probably safe to say that this problem is not getting any better when the workforce is smaller and employees have been shifted to answering phones for a much greater portion of their workdays. Seems like exactly the sort of workload that probably is suffering from relative neglect.
Also, I understand that the purpose of OIG is to have some kind of outside accountability for SSA‘s performance, but in an ideal organization there would be continuous wide-ranging internal reviews of issues like this, with corresponding adjustments in procedures and improvements in software to address the problems discovered. Something beyond telling overworked employees to do a better job on everything they touch from 8 am to 5 pm. Is that kind of proactive internal review going on? I never got the sense that it was. Feels like SSA just waits around for OIG to shine their flashlight somewhere and then maybe tries to do some PR damage control afterward. If they are doing it, it’s apparently not working very well.
If Frank is able to show improvement on audits/investigations like this - assuming OIG retains some level of true independence – then he could credibly claim he is remaking SSA. He’s way too far into his tenure to rely solely on telephone answer times as the deciding metric as to whether things are getting better. But as this story indicates, these OIG audits take a long time to conduct and prepare, so we won’t know anytime soon what is really going on beneath the surface at SSA.
The problem is that you are NOT doing your job. The incorrect payments depletes the trust fund. The payment errors come back in the form of overpayments which only increases the workloads of SSA employees and frustrate the public.
Maybe people would fill out the SSA-1372 if it weren’t literally titled advance notice of TERMINATION of child benefits. Sounds more like an informational notice than a form to fill out.
The mess they’ve made will start to surface near the end of the current administration’s term, or be buried until the next administration comes in. And by then the mess will be so big it will take years to resolve. By then the voters will have grown restless, forgotten how bad things were a few years earlier, and decide to turn the reins right back over to the party whose inability to govern caused the very mess they’re sick of.
It’s a tale older than cable television.
You are absolutely correct.
An issue is: Being proactive at any level of SSA (besides your own individual workload) requires putting work on someone else's plate, too. There's no appetite or capacity for this.
My own area has a painful and difficult reckoning related to the reorganization that is pending since early last year. It has to be done at some point, but it will be painful and difficult, so no one wants to be the one to say "do it", at any level of management.
Management has literally spent the last 15-20 years destroying SSA's training processes. It is too much to expect them to actually do something to improve them.
More cartoon powerpoints and VOD sessions that don't address the actual complexities of the workloads don't help things.
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