SSA is making benefit payments to some persons representing beneficiaries even though those representatives may have been terminated or were not approved in the first place, according to an IG report.
Representative payees are designated to handle the payments to persons who cannot manage their own finances, for example because of impairment. SSA selects the payees and maintains a nationwide database of pending, selected, non-selected and terminated payees, which it uses to process representative applications.
However, the report said SSA does not always remove terminated or non-selected payees from its master beneficiary record nor add those selected to that record. The system also did not always generate alerts when information in the payee database did not agree with information in the master records.
The IG report estimated that SSA paid terminated or non-selected payees about $367 million in benefits on behalf of some 13,500 beneficiaries. In addition, it improperly terminated some 14,800 other payees and did not select payees serving some 29,200 beneficiaries. SSA management agreed with the recommendations to address those issues.
