The Social Security Administration (SSA) gave $1.29 billion in payments to individuals who were not considered disabled, a mistake the agency says is a “small payment error.”
The SSA made improper payments to roughly 36,000 individuals who were able to earn more than $1,000 per month, rendering them ineligible for the Disability Insurance (DI) program, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Friday.
The cost to the taxpayers was nearly $1.3 billion.
The SSA said that the overall rate of overpayment is low, but the sheer number of people involved in the program leads to large totals.
“While our overpayment accuracy rates are high, even small payment errors result in large costs to taxpayers and to DI beneficiaries,” said Katherine A. Thornton, deputy chief of staff for the SSA, in the SSA’s response to the report.
“The true extent of overpayments is currently unknown,” the GAO said, “but our prior work suggests that most overpayments are related to beneficiaries who worked while receiving benefits.”
“This report demonstrates just how little importance the Social Security Administration places on policing its disability rolls,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in a statement.
“SSA has known for years that it could prevent millions of dollars in improper disability payments using quarterly wage records, but chose not to,” he said.
The GAO based its findings on earnings data from the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) database. SSA uses the database for oversight of its Social Security Insurance program but does not use the NDNH to conduct oversight of the DI program.
