The agency placed the blame partly on a shortage of workers and funding.
The backlog of payment actions at the Social Security Administration (SSA) is now at a “record-breaking” level, causing the agency to make more than a billion dollars in improper payments to beneficiaries, according to the SSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).
The SSA’s backlog of pending actions hit an “all-time high” of 5.2 million as of February, the OIG said in an Aug. 8 statement, citing an analysis published in June. Pending actions at the agency’s claims processing centers that remain unresolved for a long period of time have resulted in “larger improper payments, including growing underpayments or increasing overpayments to beneficiaries.”
Overpayments put Social Security beneficiaries under a great burden since the agency will ask them to pay back the overpaid amount at any time. Some recipients may not be in a financial position to repay.
Meanwhile, underpayments mean beneficiaries don’t receive their correct monthly payment, which is financially challenging for many recipients.
The delay in resolving pending actions caused the SSA to make $1.1 billion worth of improper payments by February, the OIG stated.
“Customer satisfaction has been an ongoing concern for SSA,” said Michelle Anderson, acting inspector general for SSA. “This report continues to highlight the urgency for SSA to reach its pending actions performance goal and to ensure beneficiaries receive their proper payments as promptly as possible.”
SSA blamed the “record-breaking” backlog on increased workload, staff reductions, and lower-than-expected funding for overtime. Overtime funding could be used to pay workers to resolve more pending actions, thus reducing the backlog, the agency said.
The SSA had reviewed the draft version of the OIG report and sent a response to the watchdog in June. The agency agreed on the need to trim the processing centers’ pending actions backlog and processing delays. However, that would require “additional resources,” it said in its response.
The SSA pointed out that the agency has “over 650 fewer employees working on processing centers’ workloads now than we did eight years ago, while our beneficiary count has risen from roughly 64 million people to nearly 72 million in that same time period.”
Moreover, the SSA is experiencing staffing challenges with high separation rates in key roles. Without adequate funding, the agency is “left to prioritize growing workloads with our current resources in mind.”
