SSA has limited access to automated real-time information required to determine beneficiaries’ eligibility and payment amounts. Image: Alexey Rotanov/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe SSA made an estimated $32.8 billion in overpayments over 2020-2023 in its two largest benefit programs but those were largely due to failure of beneficiaries or their survivors to report pertinent information, not to miscalculations by the agency, an inspector general audit has said.
It said that calculation errors accounted for only 2 percent of overpayments in the Supplemental Security Income program and at most 9 percent of those in the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program.
In the former, where eligibility is based on income and assets, just above half of overpayments resulted from unreported earnings and other income and another quarter due to unreported other information affecting entitlement. Another tenth resulted from unreported changes in living arrangements or in-kind support, while the rest were undetermined.
In the OASDI program, more than a third of overpayments were due to failure to report earnings or the end of a disabling condition and another quarter due to unreported earnings affecting the “earnings test” reduction. Failure to report deaths, other government payments, fraud and numerous other factors accounted for the rest.
Said the report, which made no recommendations, “SSA has limited access to automated real-time information required to determine beneficiaries’ eligibility and payment amounts. Instead, SSA depends on beneficiaries, representative payees, or family members to timely provide this information or receipt of this information, after the fact, from other sources.”
“Without more automated data feeds, SSA will continue to require resources for assessing and pursuing the recovery of billions of dollars in overpayments. This places a burden on SSA by requiring SSA employees to spend valuable time on these processes versus focusing on other workloads and places a burden on beneficiaries who must determine how to pay back the overpayments,” it said.
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