Reporting a paycheck to Social Security every month is one of the most common ways Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance recipients trigger an accidental overpayment notice — a missed call, a rounded figure, a pay stub that never gets mailed in time. Since April 2025, Social Security has offered a way around…

A little-noticed notice in the Federal Register set a fixed date for two federal agencies to start comparing millions of records against each other, built around a subsidy that officials say many retirees never get around to claiming. The Social Security Administration confirmed it would begin checking civil service payment data supplied by the Office…

Across five fiscal years of payment-accuracy reviews, one now-defunct rule kept surfacing as the single biggest reason Social Security miscalculated a retirement or disability benefit. The finding sits inside a routine payment-accuracy audit most beneficiaries will never read, yet it explains why some overpayment notices arriving today can trace back to a formula Congress eliminated…

Money sitting in a savings or checking account can quietly end a household’s eligibility for Supplemental Security Income, the federal program that pays older, blind, and disabled Americans with little income and few resources. According to the Social Security Administration’s own inspector general, the agency’s estimates put the yearly cost of these account-related mistakes at…

Inside the Social Security Administration, an earnings alert is a routine flag: income reported to the Internal Revenue Service does not match what a Supplemental Security Income recipient told the agency, and a caseworker is supposed to sort out the difference. Most alerts close within weeks. One, according to an audit from the agency’s Office…

Social Security relies on a promise: applicants and recipients report what they own, and the agency accepts what they say. A federal audit released this month tested that promise against 208 real case files and found it breaking down more often than officials might like, with something as ordinary as a second car sitting at…

What happens when a field office lets an earnings alert sit unopened took sixteen months to trace, and the answer now carries a price tag. Auditors at the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General pulled 100 recipients at random from a pool of more than 417,000 people whose alerts were still pending, then…

The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General spent more than a year combing agency files on beneficiaries who died still owing money, and singled out one category of case that slipped past review more than any other: survivors who kept a payment the agency was supposed to hold back. The audit lays out…

Hundreds of millions of dollars in large Supplemental Security Income underpayments left the Social Security Administration without the second review meant to catch mistakes before the money went out the door. That is the conclusion of a new audit by the agency’s own Office of the Inspector General, which pulled a sample of payments Social…

When a Supplemental Security Income recipient dies still owed money by the Social Security Administration, who can collect it and how long they have to ask hinges on one narrow, technical fact: whether their surviving spouse was a full member of an “eligible couple” with them in the month of death. That single distinction, buried…