The low-income people benefiting from several federal social security schemes are facing a financial crisis to repay their benefits that SSA announced to be wrongfully transferred to ineligible citizens. How can the overpayment problem be solved?
Let’s read and find out.
How Social Security can fix its overpayment problem?
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has been demanding a repayment of billions of dollars from many American citizens after the agency argued that the payment was wrongfully made to ineligible people.
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The agency has recovered $4.7 billion that it paid to people and $21.6 billion remains in standing.
The U.S. House Ways and Means subcommittee will hold a hearing next week to resolve the overpayment issue that SSA claims to have made to the alleged ineligible Americans.
Additionally, some congress members wanted SSA to answer the act of offering huge payments to people and then demanding the money back. The U.S. House of Representative for Ohio, Mike Carey, said, “The general sense from members is we do have a problem, we’ve got to address it, we’ve got to fix it.”
Another prominent figure who criticized SSA is Rick Scott, a Florida representative and a member of the Committee on Aging, who has questioned the growth of overpayments to $20 billion. He said, “Is somebody going to be held accountable at the federal level for, you know, messing this up?”
Although this overpayment amount seems a small part of the SSA’s expenditure for social security schemes, it forms a large part of someone’s benefits amount.
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As such, the repayment demand for the large amount may put those Americans in a financial crisis who can’t afford to repay the benefit. This is mainly true for people unaware of the mistake and having spent their benefits.
The overpayment issue that has resulted from a poor administrative process can be due to the way the SSA reviews the eligibility of individuals for the benefits.
The agency currently measures the overpayment using a retrospective process that analyses changes in a beneficiary’s living condition for some months or years. Suppose there is an increase in savings for an SSI beneficiary or an increase in working hours for an SSDI or SSI beneficiary.
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In that case, it leads to the conclusion that benefit payments were wrong and need to be repaid.
The overpayment problem can be resolved if the SSA improves the accuracy of the eligibility determination process by adopting a prospective eligibility and certification instead of a retrospective process.
In this way, the beneficiary’s eligibility and benefits can be determined periodically, and then the agency can authorize the benefit limit for a fixed period.
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In case a beneficiary’s income changes, their benefits can be easily adjusted accordingly during the recertification. However, the method does not propose to recover the past payments made to the beneficiaries.
The prospective process allows flexibility in beneficiaries’ situations because the time of the certification period will vary for different beneficiaries.
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Social Security programs indeed play a crucial role in uplifting the lives of several low-income people by helping them afford basic necessities like nutrition, healthcare, education, etc. But issues like overpayment primarily affect those people who could hardly earn an optimum income to survive, uprooting the people’s trust in the administration and further deteriorating the government-people relationship.
Therefore, the federal government should focus on how it can interact with more needy people to improve the worsening situation.
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