Social Security’s 2026 annual report on the Supplemental Security Income program, transmitted to Congress on July 24, describes two verification systems reaching further into a recipient’s financial life than the agency’s older, largely self-reported process did: a bank-balance check called Access to Financial Institution and a wage-matching feed called the Payroll Information Exchange. For the…

Something that has arrived by mail every month for more than eighty years is being phased out before the end of 2026. The Social Security Administration says it plans to complete the move of every beneficiary — retirement, survivor, disability and SSI recipients alike — onto electronic payments during this calendar year, closing out the…

A federal watchdog spent parts of two years tracing what happens to outside records the moment they land inside Social Security’s computers — and found that the agency’s matching software rejects far more of them than its public messaging would suggest. The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General reviewed five years of incoming…

Every fall, one number quietly resets what more than 70 million Social Security and Supplemental Security Income checks will look like come January, and this year’s version now has a locked release date sitting one month out. The Social Security Administration is set to publish the 2027 cost-of-living adjustment on October 14, once the Bureau…