Anyone who receives a Social Security overpayment notice is allowed to do one thing before paying anything back: ask the agency, in writing, to explain how the number was calculated. Tracing what happens after that request took auditors months. The answer, laid out in a new inspector general audit, is that the process meant to…

A new watchdog report on the Social Security Administration has surfaced a backlog of Supplemental Security Income payments that were due years ago and still have not gone out. The agency’s own Office of the Inspector General sampled the underpayments sitting in SSA’s records and found that some of the oldest unresolved cases, involving living…

For nearly two years, auditors checked Social Security’s overpayment letters against the notice rules the agency wrote for itself. A large share of those letters did not measure up. The review covered notices sent to people the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program had already overpaid, not any other benefit type. Auditors pulled a random…

Every January, Social Security’s monthly deposit changes by a specific percentage locked in the previous October. For the raise that takes effect in January 2027, that percentage does not exist yet. Not the Social Security Administration, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and not the advocacy groups already publishing forecasts can name the real number,…

Social Security’s own guidance on resolving an overpayment includes a line that catches many families off guard: if a beneficiary dies before finishing repayment, the agency can seek the remaining balance from anyone who receives benefits on that same earnings record. In practice, that often means a widow or widower who starts collecting survivor benefits…

Social Security’s own numbers show the initial disability claims backlog climbed by 22,000 people between February and June of this year, even as the agency told Congress the same backlog had fallen by more than 30 percent from its 2024 peak. For a household waiting on a first decision on a Social Security Disability Insurance…

The Social Security Administration has quietly dropped a promise it made in 2024 to hold an annual January review of the $9,200 cap on what a disability representative can collect from a client’s back pay. That review was due to start this January. It never happened, and the agency has told the public in writing…

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…