Social Security overpaid benefits

WASHINGTON — Social Security overpaid disability beneficiaries by nearly $ 17 billion over the past decade, a government watchdog said Friday, raising alarms about the massive program just as it approaches the brink of insolvency.

Many payments went to people who earned too much money to qualify for benefits, or to those no longer disabled. Payments also went to people who had died or were in prison.

In all, nearly half of the 9 million people receiving disability payments were overpaid, according to the results of a 10- year study by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general.

Social Security was able to recoup about $ 8.1 billion, but it often took years to get the money back, the study said.

“Every dollar misallocated is a dollar lost for those who truly need it most,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R- Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “Today’s report shows the inability of the Social Security Administration to properly safeguard payments, which has no doubt contributed to speeding the fund toward exhaustion.”

The trust fund that supports Social Security’s disability program is projected to run out of money late next year, triggering automatic benefit cuts, unless Congress acts. The looming deadline has lawmakers feuding over a solution that may have to come in the heat of a presidential election.

The program’s financial problems go beyond the issue of overpayments — Social Security disability has paid out more in benefits than it has collected in payroll taxes every year for the past decade. But concerns about waste, fraud and abuse are complicating the debate in Congress over how to address the program’s larger financial problems.

A spokesman for the Social Security Administration said the agency has a high accuracy rate for its payments and a comprehensive debt collection program for overpayments.

“Social Security provides services to over 48 million retirement and survivors beneficiaries and about 15 million disability beneficiaries,” Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle said in an email. “The agency will issue nearly $ 1 trillion in payments this year. For fiscal year 2013 — the last year for which we have complete data — approximately 99.8 percent of all Social Security payments were free of overpayment, and nearly 99.9 percent were free of underpayment.”

“That same year, we also achieved high levels of payment accuracy in the ( Supplemental Security Income) program despite the inherent complexities in calculating monthly payments due to beneficiaries’ income and resource fluctuations and changes in living arrangements,” Hinkle said.

The inspector general’s office examined a randomly selected sample of 1,532 people who were receiving either Social Security disability or Supplemental Security Income in October 2003. SSI is a separately- funded disability program for the poor.

Auditors followed the group for 10 years, until February 2014. They determined that 45 percent of the beneficiaries were overpaid at some point during that period. The overpayments totaled $ 2.9 million, the study said.

They used the results to estimate that Social Security made a total of $ 16.8 billion in overpayments during the 10- year period.

The study concluded that “the agency could do more to prevent the most common overpayments.”

One man was convicted of fraud in 2005 while he was getting benefits under his father’s Social Security number. Minors can do this if they have legitimate disabilities, though this man was found to be working and hiding his income, the study said.

A judge ordered him to repay nearly $ 18,000. He repaid $ 550, the study said.

In 2013, Social Security approved a new disability claim for the man, under his Social Security number. The agency is supposed to withhold part of his payments while he repays the old debt. But the agency never did because he was receiving the new benefits under a different Social Security number, the report said.