Posted on 07/04/2015 12:23:41 AM PDT by Olog-hai
The Social Security Administration (SSA) spends more money than it collects when trying to recover payments to individuals who received benefits for which they were not eligible.
According to the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the SSA issued $128.3 million in “low-dollar” overpayments between 2008 and 2013, and then spent $323 million to collect them. The agency ultimately recovered only $109.4 million. “This resulted in SSA spending over $213.6 million more than it collected,” the OIG said, in an audit released Wednesday. […]
The overpayments were distributed through the SSA’s Retirement and Survivors Insurance (RSI), Disability Insurance (DI), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. The SSA issued approximately $16.8 billion in disability insurance overpayments alone in the past decade. …
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
The beauty is that while SSA spends more of what they supposedly don’t have, you don’t have enough to get caught. Without that mutually assured destruction of your personal economy, what is to stop everyone from fraud?
The old adage “ ... We lose money on every one sold, but we make it up on volume ...”
Greek Tragedy in the making here...
What do they care? It’s not their money.
What ever.happened to the civil service exam that that all prospective government workers had to pass?
It appears that, like our immigration laws, it has been ignored or debased.
Our government -included Congress- is composed of people who are focused only on themselves. Worse, they are mostly incompetent and all of them are corrupt.
I worked at SSA at the time the SSI program was initiated. I worked in the statistical end of things not in the actual application, calculation and payment part of the program. The idea was to supplement the income of those who didn’t have anything. The ruling from the higher ups was that if you weren’t sure of how much a person should get give them the higher amount. When it was determined they were getting too much you couldn’t reduce the payment and since they didn’t have anything you obviously couldn’t collect any overpayment. The big push was to reduce the % of initial overpayments. However, since you couldn’t collect what was already overpayed or reduce the amount those already being overpayed were getting, the total $ of overpayments would always increase. The average worker bee realized this, pointed out the conflicts/inconsitencies in the prodeedures, etc but were ignored. The stupid rules, made by stupid lawmakers and high admin officials always leads to the blame being placed at the level of those who are required to follow the rules.
As a Navy disbursung office the rule was: “When in doubt, screw the member!” Pay the lower amount not the higher one. Just the reverse of the SSI rule. Always better to tell someone: “ Here’s another $XXX that I owe you.”
Guess the word, pre-emptive isn’t in their dictionary.
Don’t let it out the door in the first place.
High paid idiots.
this isn’t going to change until the money runs out......................
This seems crazy to me. They have people working at SSA getting a regular paycheck who are (supposedly)keeping track of this stuff. Why should it cost extra to cut off funds where there shouldn’t be any funds going?
It is “crazy”. It is the government and government “workers”. When have they done anything without exhorbitant costs? I guess that is why we are at least $20,000,000,000,000.00 or so in debt. They all feel that it isn’t their money so what difference does it make.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.