 Commissioner
O’Malley testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging
and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (excerpt):
“For 88 years, the hard-working employees of the Social Security
Administration have strived to pay the right amount, to the right
person, at the right time. And the agency has done this with a high
degree of accuracy over a massive scale of beneficiaries. But
despite our best efforts, we sometimes get it wrong and pay
beneficiaries more than they are due, creating an overpayment.
When that happens, Congress requires that we make every effort to
recover those overpaid benefits. But doing so without regard to the
larger purpose of the program can result in grave injustices to
individuals, as we see from the stories of people losing their homes
or being put in dire financial straits when they suddenly see their
benefits cut off to recover a decades-old overpayment, or disability
beneficiaries attempting to work and finding their efforts rewarded
with large overpayments. Innocent people can be badly hurt. And
these injustices shock our shared sense of equity and good
conscience as Americans.
We are continually improving how we serve the
millions of people who depend on our programs, although we have room
for improvement, as media reports last fall revealed. We have also
embarked upon a deep dive into the extent of the overpayment problem
at Social Security, the root causes of these administrative errors,
and the steps we can take as an agency to address these individual
injustices.
Our deeper understanding of the complexities of this problem has set
us on the following course of action:
1. Starting next Monday, March 25, we will be ceasing the
heavy-handed practice of intercepting 100 percent of an overpaid
beneficiary’s monthly Social Security benefit by default if they
fail to respond to our demand for repayment. Moving forward, we will
now use a much more reasonable default withholding rate of 10
percent of monthly benefits — similar to the current rate in the
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program.
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2. We will be reframing our guidance and procedures
so that the burden of proof shifts away from the claimant in
determining whether there is any evidence that the claimant was at
fault in causing the overpayment.
3. For the vast majority of
beneficiaries who request to work out a repayment plan, we recently
changed our policy so that we will approve repayment plans of up to
60 months. To qualify, Social Security beneficiaries would only need
to provide a verbal summary of their income, resources, and
expenses, and recipients of the means-tested SSI program would not
need to provide even this summary. This change extended this easier
repayment option by an additional two years (from 36 to 60 months).
4. And finally, we will be making it much easier for overpaid
beneficiaries to request a waiver of repayment, in the event they
believe themselves to have been without any fault and/or without the
ability to repay.
Implementing these policy changes — with proper education and
training across the people, policies, and systems of the agency — is
an important but complex shift. And we are undertaking that shift
with urgency, diligence, and speed.
I look forward to working with Members to discuss ideas that could
address the root causes of overpayments.”
Social Security launched a comprehensive review in October 2023 of
agency overpayment policies and procedures to address payment
accuracy systematically.
[Jack Myers
Public Affairs Specialist
Social Security Administration]
This press release was produced and disseminated at U.S. taxpayer
expense.
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