Social Security has not paid an estimated $94.9 million in back payments that were owed to people who have since died, according to a new audit by the agency’s inspector general. The figure covers Supplemental Security Income, the monthly benefit for low-income older, blind and disabled people. It is an estimate of 444,265 unpaid underpayments, and only a few kinds of survivors can still collect.

The inspector general’s office, which audits the Social Security Administration, sent the findings to Commissioner Frank Bisignano in a memo dated August 28. Auditors checked whether the agency paid SSI recipients the underpayments they were due. A sample of cases was reviewed, and the totals were projected from it.

An underpayment is back pay for months when a recipient should have received more than SSI actually paid. For people who died before the money went out, it does not simply vanish, but the rules name only a short list of people who can receive it. Families wondering whether a late relative left an unpaid SSI amount need to know who the law lets SSA pay, and how little time some of them have to ask.

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What the audit found

The report, number 062407, looked at about 2.5 million SSI underpayments that were pending on the agency’s records as of September 2024. The inspector general’s office pulled a sample of 160 and found that 69 recipients, or 43 percent, never received what they were owed. The audit work ran from December 2024 through July 2026.

From that sample, the auditors projected the totals. They estimate that Social Security did not pay about 444,265 underpayments totaling $94,907,619 that belonged to recipients before death or to eligible survivors. Another 610,165 unpaid underpayments, about $195.6 million, are owed to recipients who are still living.

Taken together, the audit puts the unpaid pile at about 1.1 million underpayments and roughly $291 million. The deceased-recipient share is about a third of that dollar total. The numbers are estimates, and the report gives a wide range for the living-recipient figure, from $99.8 million to $291.5 million.

Who can still be paid

Under Social Security’s regulation on underpayments after a recipient dies, the agency may pay a surviving eligible spouse who lived with the recipient in the month of death or in the six months before. If the person who died was a blind or disabled child, the agency may pay the parents who lived with that child during the same stretch.

When a person was living with both a spouse and a parent, the rule splits the money by period. Parents are paid for the months the person counted as a blind or disabled child. The spouse is paid for later months, and also for the child months if no parent can be paid. Adult children, siblings and other relatives are not on the regulation’s list.

The rule also sets a clock. A survivor other than the eligible spouse who asks for payment more than 24 months after the month of death will not be paid. The regulation sets no such limit for an eligible spouse, and the audit report says a spouse may request payment at any time.

The audit adds that Social Security identifies and notifies potentially eligible survivors. A spouse or parent who never got such a letter after a loss should not assume nothing is owed, since the audit found that unpaid amounts sat on the agency’s records.

Money no one can collect

A separate category in the audit is even larger. The auditors estimate that about 803,000 underpayments, totaling $222.4 million, are not payable to anyone. In those cases the recipient died and no eligible survivor exists, so the amounts cannot be paid out.

The auditors looked at 80 sampled underpayments belonging to deceased recipients. Of those, 47, worth $22,861 in the sample, were still on SSA’s records even though no one could be paid. The regulation names no route for a distant relative or an executor to collect such money, however large the number looks.

That distinction matters for anyone who sees the $94.9 million headline and assumes a relative’s estate is in line for a check. For most families, the rule lets only a spouse or a parent of a disabled child collect.

What the agency says it will do

The inspector general made three recommendations. SSA should act on the 139 underpayments the audit identified, decide whether and how to find and resolve the estimated 1.1 million outstanding underpayments, and find out why employees made errors so erroneous underpayments get removed. The agency agreed with all three.

The report also notes that in an earlier audit SSA agreed to remove unpayable underpayments but later decided not to spend resources on the work. Staff told auditors the agency would not dedicate resources to handling amounts that cannot be paid to anyone. Whether SSA will now chase down the payable ones is not spelled out in the report.

The auditors blamed manual work. Employees have to process underpayments on closed and deceased records by hand, and the agency’s system sends limited notifications, which makes the cases hard to track.

Is a relative who died still owed money somewhere else?

An unpaid SSI amount is rarely the only loose end after a death. Families often find old life insurance, a forgotten pension or a bank account in another state only by chance, and most of it sits unclaimed until someone goes looking.

The Money Owed to You Bundle puts all 8 Money Owed guides in one download, including the Life Insurance Policy Locator with the free national locator and the steps for filing the death claim. Find Unclaimed Money in Every State covers every state a person lived in and every name used. Every search and claim it describes is free at the official source.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.