The Social Security Administration (SSA) has said it is dealing with a “record-breaking backlog” of cases that has caused more than $1 billion in improper payments.
A new report by the SSA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has found that more than $1.1 billion in incorrect payments to 528,000 benefit recipients were made by the government agency due to an enormous backlog of pending actions that are managed by processing centers across the country.
It found that the SSA met its performance measure goals for pending processing center actions in four of the six fiscal years between 2018 and 2023.
Underpayments and overpayments are when a recipient’s benefits are calculated incorrectly, resulting in them receiving less or more money than they are actually owed.
“The longer it takes SSA to process pending actions, the longer beneficiaries wait for underpayments due or they receive larger overpayments to pay back,” the report reads.
The report estimated that if pending cases had been resolved promptly, approximately 528,000 Social Security beneficiaries would have received improper payment amounts that totaled $534 million.
However, due to the delay in resolving these cases, the improper payment amount for these beneficiaries increased to around $756 million after 12 months. At the time of the OIG’s review, a significant number of cases had been outstanding for over 12 months, resulting in a total improper payment amount of $1.1 billion.
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The OIG report also found that the average processing time for an improper payment in their sample was 698 days. The SSA has laid the blame on “unexpected staff reductions, increased workloads, and less than expected overtime funding it would have used to pay employees to process more PC [processing center] pending actions.”
In one instance cited in the report, the SSA overpaid a disability beneficiary by $62,000. After learning of the mistake in June 2021, the anonymous recipient had already received $9,000 in overpayments throughout the course of four months.
However, the SSA did not take action to collect that overpayment until May 2023, almost two years later, by which time the beneficiary had been incorrectly paid $53,000. “Although the beneficiary signed a Request for Waiver of Overpayment Recovery and indicated the overpayment was not their fault and they cannot afford to pay the money back, the claimant subsequently agreed to a partial repayment plan,” the report reads.
Newsweek has previously reported on numerous instances of elderly and disabled benefit recipients being hit with repayment demands in the tens of thousands of dollars after their benefits were miscalculated, often through no fault of their own. Beneficiaries were asked to make full payments within 30 days of being sent a notice.
Earlier this year, the government agency announced it would begin collecting 10 percent of a person’s total monthly Social Security benefit to recover an overpayment, rather than collecting 100 percent.
“Social Security is taking a critically important step towards our goal of ensuring our overpayment policies are fair, equitable, and do not unduly harm anyone,” said commissioner Martin O’Malley. “It’s unconscionable that someone would find themselves facing homelessness or unable to pay bills because Social Security withheld their entire payment for recovery of an overpayment.”
In a previous statement made to Newsweek, a spokesperson for the SSA said: “Social Security is required by law to adjust benefits or recover debts when we establish that someone received payments to which they are not entitled and an overpayment occurs. We must maintain our responsibilities to taxpayers to be good stewards of the trust funds.”
