The agency placed the blame partly on a shortage of workers and funding.
The backlog of payment actions at the Social Security Administration (SSA) is now at a “record-breaking” level, resulting in the agency making over a billion dollars in improper payments to beneficiaries, according to the SSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).
Overpayments put social security beneficiaries under a great burden since the agency will ask them to pay back the overpaid amount at any time. Some recipients may not be in a financial position to repay.
Meanwhile, underpayments mean beneficiaries do not receive their correct monthly payment, which is financially challenging for many recipients.
The delay in resolving pending actions led to the SSA making $1.1 billion worth of improper payments by February, the OIG stated.
“Customer satisfaction has been an ongoing concern for SSA,” said Michelle Anderson, acting Inspector General for SSA. “This report continues to highlight the urgency for SSA to reach its pending actions performance goal and to ensure beneficiaries receive their proper payments as promptly as possible.”
SSA blamed the “record-breaking” backlog on increased workload, staff reductions, and lower-than-expected funding for overtime. Overtime funding could be used to pay workers to resolve more pending actions, thus reducing the backlog, the agency said.
The SSA pointed out that the agency has “over 650 fewer employees working on processing centers’ workloads now than we did eight years ago, while our beneficiary count has risen from roughly 64 million people to nearly 72 million in that same time period.”
Moreover, the SSA is experiencing staffing challenges with high separation rates in key roles. Without adequate funding, the agency is “left to prioritize growing workloads with our current resources in mind.”
Improper Payment Issue
The OIG pointed out in its report that the SSA failed to reduce its processing center pending actions over the past six years, resulting in the backlog rising from 3.2 million in fiscal year 2018 to 4.6 million last year.
As the backlog kept growing, pending actions remained unresolved for longer periods, the report stated. Of 139 processing centers’ (PC) actions analyzed by the OIG, almost three-fourths were pending for 300 days or more, with 43 percent unresolved for 500 days or longer.
“Once processed, PC pending actions can result in improper payments … The longer it takes SSA to process PC pending actions, the longer beneficiaries wait for underpayments due or they receive larger overpayments to pay back.”
In one instance, the SSA initially identified an overpaid beneficiary back in June 2021 when the person had received $9,000 in excess money from the agency. However, the SSA only took action to collect overpayments around two years later, in May 2023. During this time, the overpayments continued, with the overpaid amount totaling $62,000.
Even though the beneficiary sought a waiver arguing that the agency was at fault and that the individual could not afford to pay back the money, the person had to agree to make partial payments to resolve the case, the report stated.
Earlier, the SSA would have withheld 100 percent of a beneficiary’s monthly benefits until the overpaid amount was collected.
However, the new rule dismissed this practice. Instead, the agency now collects 10 percent or $10, whichever is greater, of the overpaid amount from the monthly benefits to recover overpayments.
“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,” Martin O’Malley, commissioner of Social Security, said at the time.