Federal Manager's Daily Report

An audit by the SSA inspector general has found instances of federal employees improperly receiving both FECA injury compensation payments and Social Security disability payments, an issue that GAO also raised in a report earlier this year.

The IG examined 100 cases in which a coding indicated that an individual likely received FECA benefits, or at least had filed a claim for them, and found that to be true in 88 of the cases. Of those, 65 were concurrently receiving both FECA and disability insurance benefits. DI beneficiaries are required to report benefits they receive from FECA or other similar programs, and above a certain limit benefits are to offset.

“In many cases, FECA payments changed after the beneficiaries began receiving DI benefits, but we found SSA updated its records infrequently, sometimes months or years after a change, and sometimes not at all. In many cases, these errors resulted in improper payments,” the report said.

The audit identified total improper payments of about $853,000 for 39 of the 65 DI beneficiaries who were receiving concurrent FECA payments. Specifically, SSA overpaid 28 beneficiaries about $797,000 and underpaid 11 beneficiaries about $56,000.

“Based on these results, we estimate SSA improperly paid 5,960 beneficiaries approximately $130 million because it did not properly offset their DI benefits for their FECA payments,” it said.

Continued receipt of FECA benefits among those who clearly will not return to federal employment long has been an issue for agency managers since those costs are charged back to the employing agency, unlike disability retirement costs that are charged to the federal retirement fund.