The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently did an audit that showed the Social Security Administration (SSA) gave over $20 million in benefits to people who were not supposed to get them.
The probed area was the organization’s Electronic Representative Payee System (eRPS), a web-based system that handles applications for representative payees and keeps important data.
The results show that the SSA sent $22.8 million to the wrong people because of problems with the system.
The eRPS is meant to make it easier to send money to agent payees, who are people who handle Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for people who can not handle their own money.
Most of the time, these payees are family members or close friends of the recipients, who could be children or people with serious disabilities. The system was supposed to make managing benefits easier, but it has bugs that have led to big payment mistakes.
The audit showed that the main issue is the wrong transfer of data between the eRPS and SSA payment records. Even though the system is meant to let workers know when there is a difference between records, the mistakes still have to be fixed by hand.
The report said that workers should “review eRPS and the payment records after they process payee applications to make sure their inputs worked correctly and the payment records were updated correctly.”
The audit made it clear that mistakes are more likely to happen when workers have to do things by hand without enough supervision or checks.
The impact of the payment mistakes on Social Security recipients
The report also found that SSA had wrongly identified the types of payees for about 9,300 beneficiaries. Because of this mistake, things got even more complicated.
The agency either forgot to get important financial reports from about 3,900 representative payees or asked payees who were not supposed to give them to send them anyway.
A lot of the time, representative payees have to send in a yearly report about how they handled the benefits they got for the beneficiaries.
This bad handling of filing duties not only causes confusion in the workplace, but it also makes it harder for the SSA to keep an eye on how the money is being spent.
The study also said that if these problems were not fixed quickly, the agency would keep sending money to the wrong people and not be able to keep an eye on how benefits are used.
This lack of oversight could make it more likely for benefits to be mistreated, which would hurt the people who depend on them.
To deal with these worries, the OIG came up with a number of suggestions. One of the most important suggestions was to look over cases where payees did not match up and to tell staff of the right way to handle applications for representative payees.
The SSA has decided to follow these suggestions, which should help cut down on the mistakes that have led to bad payment management.
In addition to this audit, other steps are being taken to help the SSA deal with its continued problems with handling payments worth billions of dollars.
The office has had problems with both underpayments and over payments, which happen when people who are supposed to get benefits get less or more than they are owed because of mistakes in the calculations.
Because of these mistakes, the agency has given out large amounts of money without permission. This means that controls and accountability need to be tightened.
People who rely on these benefits, like the elderly and disabled, have felt the effects of these mistakes the most. In the past few years, there have been many accounts of people who were supposed to get benefits being asked to repay large amounts of money, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, after getting wrong payments through no fault of their own.
Some people have had to return these over payments within 30 days of getting notice from the SSA, which is too much of a load for people who are already having trouble with money.
Also see:-With the new COLA, everything changes. Social Security also says that checks will change
