A federal audit of child’s insurance benefit claims found that Social Security wrongly denied some of them and miscalculated others. In a sample of 100 claims, the agency underpaid 20 claimants a total of $174,477 and overpaid six others $86,887. The inspector general’s office projects that the errors reach well beyond the sample.
A sample of 100 drawn from 5,237 denied claims
The Social Security Office of the Inspector General published its findings in Report 052505, “Child’s Insurance Benefit Claims Denied for Disability,” in September 2026. The population was 5,237 child’s insurance claims filed between January 2023 and November 2025 that SSA initially denied on the ground that the claimant was not disabled. Auditors reviewed 100 randomly selected claims.
The objective had two parts: whether SSA correctly denied initial claims after finding claimants not disabled, and whether it paid benefits correctly after later approving claims. Commissioner Frank Bisignano and Assistant Inspector General for Audit Michelle L. Anderson are the officials named in the report.
Who the claimants are
The claims involve what SSA’s disability eligibility page calls disabled adult children: people 18 or older whose disability began before age 22. The page says such a claimant does not need a work history, since benefits are paid on the parent’s earnings record. The audit population also included minor children and students.
Eligibility is wider than the disabled-adult-child category. SSA’s publication on benefits for children says a child can receive benefits when a parent is retired or disabled and entitled to Social Security, or when a parent died after working long enough. The child must be unmarried and under 18, or between 18 and 19 and a full-time student in grade 12 or below, unless a disability that began before age 22 extends the benefit past 18.
For a family, the stakes are practical. A wrongful denial or a miscalculated payment shows up as unpaid months on a parent’s record, not as an abstract error rate, and the audit period covers claims filed over nearly three years.
Where claims went wrong: transfers to the state disability agency
The report describes a specific failure. SSA employees “incorrectly transferred claims to a DDS when SSA has already determined the claimants were disabled,” according to the report. DDS, short for Disability Determination Services, is the unit that evaluates disability claims, so a claim sent there after SSA had already found the claimant disabled is sent through a step it did not need. The audit also found failures to document evidence requests and to establish correct entitlement dates for Medicare eligibility.
In the sample, 11 claims were incorrectly denied. Projected across the 5,237-claim population at a 90 percent confidence level, that is an estimated 600 incorrect denials, or about 11 percent of the population, which matches the 11 percent rate in the sample. Another 8 sampled claims had undocumented required actions, an estimated 450 across the population. Those 600 and 450 are projections from a sample, not counts of identified claimants.
Twenty underpaid claimants, and one who accounts for most of the $174,477
Payment errors after approval were the largest category: 32 sampled claimants, an estimated 1,100 across the population. Within the sample, SSA underpaid 20 claimants a total of $174,477. This sampled amount is an actual total for those 20 claims, not a projection. The report separately states that the largest single underpayment was $152,779, as of August 2026 and uncorrected.
The arithmetic shows how concentrated the total is. Subtract $152,779 from $174,477 and $21,698 remains for the other 19 claimants, about $1,142 each on average. One claimant therefore accounts for roughly 88 percent of the sampled underpayment.
Overpayments in the same audit, and the projected total
The errors ran in both directions. The report found that SSA overpaid six claimants a total of $86,887. The inspector general projects the underpayments across the population at approximately $1.2 million, alongside the estimated 1,100 claimants with payment errors. That total is an estimate at the same 90 percent confidence level, and it is a different kind of number from the $174,477 counted in the sample.
Two recommendations followed: correct the entitlement dates or benefit payments for the identified claimants, and identify the factors causing incorrect transfers to DDS and implement corrective actions. SSA agreed to implement both. The audit does not publish an average underpayment per projected claimant, and the sampled total should not be divided across 1,100 people to produce one. The recommendations also say nothing about when corrections will be made, and the pages read for this report give no schedule.
The same children’s publication lists the documents an application needs, such as the child’s birth certificate and both Social Security numbers, and gives a toll-free line of 1-800-772-1213, with TTY service at 1-800-325-0778, open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays. The inspector general’s Report 052505 is the primary record for every audit figure above, and SSA’s agreement to carry out both recommendations is stated in that report.
Keeping a family’s Social Security claims in one place
A child’s benefit rides on a parent’s record, which means an error in one claim can sit beside several others in the same household. The audit found denials and miscalculations on exactly those family claims.
The Social Security Claiming & Family Benefits Kit includes a 27-page kit and spousal and survivor sequencing worksheets for laying out a household’s claims side by side.
Start with The Social Security Claiming & Family Benefits Kit’s large-print quick start →
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the Social Security Office of the Inspector General report and the SSA pages linked above.
