SSA overpaid billions to ineligible beneficiaries like fugitives and dead people

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has overpaid more than $16 billion in benefits over the past 10 years to people who weren’t eligible to receive them, including inmates, fugitives from justice and dead people.

A new Inspector General’s (IG) report reveals SSA managed to sustain some of the erroneous payouts for the full 10 years scrutinized in the audit. The report, titled “Overpayments in the Social Security Administration’s Disability Programs — A 10-Year Study,” covered a sampling of 1,532 beneficiaries who received benefits from late 2003 to early 2014.

The audit found that 44.5 percent of that group had received overpayments of one kind or another:

Our review of 1,532 beneficiaries in current pay status as of October 2003 found that over a 10-year period (from October 2003 through February 2014), SSA assessed overpayments for 44.5 percent of sampled beneficiaries. Based on the sample, we estimated

• SSA assessed overpayments totaling about $16.8 billion between October 2003 and February 2014 for approximately 4 million beneficiaries who were in current payment status in October 2003;
• SSA recovered about $8.1 billion of the $16.8 billion in overpayments it assessed; and
• SSA prevented about $8 billion in overpayments between October 2003 and February 2014 to approximately 1 million beneficiaries in current pay status in October 2003 by suspending monthly payments.

Additionally, the overpayment rate in Fiscal Year 2004 was 3.1 percent of all benefits paid that year.

Among those who received overpayments, the most common red flags that should have signaled ineligibility was the amount of money the beneficiaries already earned, as well as the fact that many were not disabled.

In the 1,532-member sample group alone, SSA improperly paid out $216,070 to beneficiaries in prison or who held “fugitive status” and another $209,643 to the deceased — a combined 14.7 percent of all overpayments doled out to the sample group.

Check out the full IG report here.

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