SSA OIG Audit Report: Recovery Efforts for Deceased Beneficiaries’ Overpayments

NEW AUDIT REPORT PUBLISHED

Recovery Efforts for Deceased Beneficiaries’ Overpayments

When a beneficiary dies with an outstanding overpayment, SSA policy requires that employees pursue recovery using a specific priority adjustment, including the following:
• Withholding any underpayments due the deceased beneficiary.
• Withholding any lump-sum death payment payable on the same earnings record.
• Proposing benefit adjustments against contingently liable beneficiaries.
• Recovering from the deceased beneficiary’s estate.

Audit Snapshot

We identified 17,979 adult beneficiaries who died between December 2022 and December 2024 with approximately $240 million in outstanding overpayments. We reviewed a random sample of 125 deceased beneficiaries.

Results of Review

Of the 125 beneficiaries we reviewed, SSA employees followed
policy for recovering overpayments for 66 (53 percent). However,
employees did not follow SSA’s policies for recovering
overpayments made to 59 (47 percent) beneficiaries who
subsequently died. Based on our sample results, we estimate SSA could attempt recovery of outstanding overpayments totaling approximately $106 million that 8,486 deceased beneficiaries owed by applying its priority of overpayment adjustments.

What We Recommend

We recommended SSA:

1. Pursue recovery of the 10 deceased beneficiaries’ overpayments from the contingently liable individuals identified in our review, as required by SSA policy and

2. Implement controls to ensure employees follow policy to attempt recovery of deceased beneficiaries’ overpayments from estates, contingently liable beneficiaries, and lump-sum death payments.

SSA agreed to implement our recommendations.

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