Imagine how stressful and intimidating it is to be a person whose monthly income comes largely or exclusively from Social Security payments, and then to receive a letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA) stating that you have been overpaid thousands of dollars and must pay it back right away.
It doesn’t matter if you were overpaid through no fault of your own. You still have to pay it back. If you try to ignore the letter, SSA can extract the money it says you owe by cutting off or reducing the paltry payment you receive.
In September, KFF Health News reported that, in federal fiscal year 2022, SSA overpaid Social Security recipients $26.3 billion and had, so far, clawed back $4.7 billion.
The report said that $265 million of those overpayments were due to mistakes made by the agency. But even when overpayments are triggered because SSA claims the recipient failed to report something that could change their eligibility, such as an increase in financial assets, the problem is that the agency takes so long to detect and notify the recipient of it that the amount due increases exponentially.
Remember those payments a lot of people received from the federal government during the height of the pandemic that were intended to help us stay financially afloat? Well, people who rely on Social Security got those payments, too. And KFF (formerly known as The Kaiser Family Foundation) also reported that some of them received letters saying that they now owed SSA money. One disabled woman told KFF that $3,200 she didn’t seek was deposited into her bank account and then she received a letter from SSA earlier this year stating that she had to pay back $14,026.
All of this harassment has gotten the attention of Congress. Representative Marc Molinaro, Republican of New York, contacted Dr. Kilolo Kijakazi, the Acting Commissioner of the SSA, to address the issue.
In a letter to Kijakazi, Molinaro wrote, “when an individual is . . . forced to repay an improper payment, it can be an incredibly difficult burden on beneficiaries who committed no wrongdoing. I have heard from many of my constituents of instances in which they are being told to repay tens of thousands of dollars in improper payments that were sent by the SSA. This is absolutely unfair to the Americans who unknowingly received overpayments from the SSA.”
The House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security held a hearing on the issue on October 18.
Kijakazi said the agency would conduct a review of its “overpayment policies and procedures.”
Overpayment bullying by SSA is not new. I’ve been hearing about it for decades. Just about every disabled person I know who has received Social Security support has also received an overpayment demand letter. Maybe now something will finally be done about it.