FED Issues Important Warning on Social Security Benefits – It’s Affecting Millions of Payments

A recent report says that the Social Security Administration (SSA) has given over $20 million in Social Security benefits to the wrong people.

The SSA sent $22.8 million in benefits to the wrong people, according to a review of the agency’s Electronic Representative Payee System (eRPS) by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

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For those who want to become representative payees, the eRPS web-based program handles their requests and stores all the necessary information.

The Fed has issued an important warning on Social Security benefits that will affect millions of beneficiaries

Getting Social Security or Extra Security People who are not able or willing to handle their own income benefits have someone else handle them.

This person is called a representative payee, and it is usually a family member or friend. Because the system has wrong payee information, employees have to manually move data from the eRPS system to payment records.

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When there is a difference between two records, the program tells staff, but the report says, “staff should review the Electronic Representative Payee System (eRPS) and the payment records after processing payee requests to ensure that their entries have worked properly and that the payment records have been properly updated.”

In addition, the study found that workers are less likely to follow rules and policies when they are expected to do manual tasks without enough oversight.

The audit also found that the Social Security Administration had recorded the wrong payee types for about 9,300 beneficiaries.

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This meant that the government agency either did not get the right accounting reports from about 3,900 payees or got extra reports from those payees.

Rep payees have to fill out a form every year to report the benefits they received on behalf of the recipient.

The report says that if nothing changes, the agency will keep giving benefits to the wrong people without keeping a close enough eye on how they are being used. This makes it more likely that recipients’ funds will be misused and their needs will not be met.

Beneficiaries should know that the OIG suggested ways to fix the issues, such as reminding employees of the right way to fill out an application and checking beneficiaries whose payee information was not correct.

The SSA has promised to follow through with the ideas. Over payments and underpayments—when a recipient’s benefits are calculated wrongly and they get more or less than they are owed—have led to over $1 billion in wrong payments, which the SSA has been trying to stop.

Newsweek has written about cases of elderly and disabled people who were overestimated on their benefits and were then told they had to pay back huge amounts of money. In some cases, the amounts were in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Some people have had to repay full payments within 30 days of getting a notice from the government agency, even if the wrong payment was made without their fault.

Next year, how much will Americans’ Social Security benefits increase?

According to official information from the Social Security Administration, more than 72 million Americans will get more money from Social Security because of the cost of living adjustment (COLA) that was made public on October 10th.

Thanks to this new increase in benefits every year, all recipients will start getting the following amounts in January 2025:

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