Social Security’s inspector general projects that 287,738 Supplemental Security Income back payments worth $863 million were paid between July 2021 and July 2024 with no evidence of the review the agency requires before large underpayments go out. The finding comes from an August 2026 audit that checked a sample of 100 payments. Social Security agreed to the recommendations.
The audit does not say those payments were wrong. It says the auditors could not find proof that a second look happened first. The memo went to Commissioner Frank Bisignano from Michelle L. Anderson, who signed as Assistant Inspector General for Audit.
What counts as a large SSI back payment
SSI is the monthly aid for people who are 65 or older, blind or disabled and have little income. An underpayment is the difference between what a recipient was paid and what was actually due for a given period, as the agency’s regulation defines it. When Social Security finds one, it owes the recipient, or a survivor if the recipient has died, the difference.
Underpayments of $5,000 or more triggered the extra review before March 16, 2024. Since that date, the threshold is $15,000. Employees are supposed to record each large underpayment in the SSI Underpayment Control Log, and the agency’s own experts told auditors that a case not added to the log will not get reviewed.
The group in question is SSI recipients, and survivors of recipients, who received a lump sum covering many months. A back payment like that usually follows a late award, a successful appeal or a correction of an earlier mistake. Anyone who got one can sit down with the award notice and check that the months and monthly amount on the notice match the deposit, and call Social Security at 1-800-772-1213 if the numbers do not line up.
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How the 12 of 100 turned into $863 million
The audit drew two samples. One covered 2,502,159 underpayments still pending as of September 2024. The other covered 2,397,819 underpayments that Social Security had already paid between July 31, 2021, and July 31, 2024, and it is the second group that produced the $863 million figure.
Of the 100 underpayments in the sample, 12 were big enough to require the review before payment. They totaled $43,729. The auditors found no evidence that a review was done on any of the 12.
Applied to all 2,397,819 underpayments paid in the three years ending July 31, 2024, the sample points to 287,738 payments with no record of the required review. Those payments add up to $863,171,728, the report says. It is a statistical projection, not a count of cases someone went through one by one. The audit work ran from December 2024 to July 2026.
The unpaid pile the same audit found
The audit also looked at the other end: underpayments still waiting to be paid. The 160 sampled included 80 living recipients and 80 who had died. As of September 2024 there were 2,502,159 pending SSI underpayments on the agency’s books. Auditors found 69, or 43 percent, had not been paid as required, worth $36,971 in the sample. Forty involved living recipients, 26 involved people who had died, and three involved suspended records.
For the deceased group, the 47 sampled underpayments totaled $22,861. The audit calls them not payable to anyone. Social Security’s regulation also says a survivor’s underpayment is reduced by any outstanding penalty the dead recipient owed.
Projected across the full pile, about 1.1 million unpaid underpayments worth roughly $291 million were owed to SSI recipients. Another 47 of 80 sampled underpayments tied to deceased recipients were not payable to anyone. Applied to the whole file, that works out to about 803,000 entries worth $222.4 million that could not be paid. The audit also found 11 of the 160 sampled entries, or 7 percent, were erroneous and should have been removed. They totaled $29,582 in the sample and project to roughly 120,000 entries worth $23.7 million.
What Social Security said it would do
The review before payment is the safeguard the audit says went missing. Social Security’s rule is that an underpayment of $15,000 or more, or $5,000 or more before March 16, 2024, gets checked before it is paid. Employees are supposed to log such cases so the check happens, and the audit found that when the logging step is skipped, the check is skipped with it.
The inspector general made three recommendations. Social Security should act on the 139 underpayments the audit identified, decide whether and how to find and resolve the estimated 1.1 million outstanding underpayments owed to recipients or eligible survivors, and find out why employees made errors so that mistakes are corrected and required reviews are documented.
The report says the agency agreed with all three. Social Security has not said how it would reach recipients or survivors owed money from the 1.1 million pending entries, or when. The audit work ran from December 2024 to July 2026.
Was a large SSI back payment the right size?
A big SSI back payment arrives once. If the months or the monthly amount behind it are off, nobody sends a second notice, and the inspector general found no record of a review before payment on the largest ones.
The Social Security Check Protection Kit is a 75-page guide that includes the 2026 payment calendar and a part on late, short or wrong payments. It gives a recipient a place to line up award-letter dates and deposit amounts before calling the agency.
Get the SSI back-payment guide with the 2026 payment calendar →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
