Last year, about 6.8 million recipients were paid about $33 billion in SSI benefits. To determine whether recipients remain financially eligible for SSI benefits after the initial assessment, SSA also periodically conducts redetermination reviews to verify eligibility factors such as income, resources, and living arrangements. Overpayment Deterrence and Detection Are Receiving Additional Emphasis but Some Weaknesses Remain

Since 1998, SSA has demonstrated a stronger management commitment to SSI program integrity issues. In response to our recommendations, SSA has taken numerous actions to verify recipient reported information and better detect and prevent SSI payment errors. With NDNH, SSA field staff now have access to more comprehensive and timely employment and wage information essential to verifying factors affecting SSI eligibility. SSA’s efforts to expand direct access to additional states’ data are ongoing. SSA also only recently required staff to use NDNH when conducting post entitlement reviews of individuals’ continued eligibility for benefits. In fiscal year 2001, SSI benefit payments represented about 6 percent of benefits paid under all SSA-administered programs, but the SSI program accounted for 31 percent of the agency’s administrative resources. Accordingly, SSA has taken action over the last several years to strengthen its overpayment recovery processes. 1). 2). Recommendations

In order to further strengthen SSA’s ability to deter, detect and recover SSI overpayments, we recommend that the Commissioner of Social Security take the following actions:   Sustain and expand the range of SSI program integrity activities underway and continue to develop additional tools to improve program operations and management. This would include increasing the number of SSI redeterminations conducted each year and fully implementing the overpayment detection and recovery tools provided in recent legislation. Supplemental Security Income: Additional Actions Needed to Reduce Program Vulnerability to Fraud and Abuse.
What GAO Found

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program is the nation's largest cash assistance program for the poor. The program paid $33 billion in benefits to 6.8 million aged, blind, and disabled persons in fiscal year 2001. Benefit eligibility and payment amounts for the SSI population are determined by complex and often difficult to verify financial factors such as an individual's income, resource levels, and living arrangements. Thus, the SSI program tends to be difficult, labor intensive, and time consuming to administer. These factors make the SSI program vulnerable to overpayments. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has demonstrated a stronger commitment to SSI program integrity and taken many actions to better deter and detect overpayments. Specifically, SSA has (1) obtained legislative authority in 1999 to use additional tools to verify recipients' financial eligibility for benefits, including strengthening its ability to access individuals' bank account information; (2) developed additional measures to hold staff accountable for completing assigned SSI workloads and resolving overpayment issues; (3) provided field staff with direct access to state databases to facilitate more timely verification of recipient's wages and unemployment information; and (4) significantly increased, since 1998, the number of eligibility reviews conducted each year to verify recipient's income, resources, and continuing eligibility for benefits. In addition to better detection and deterrence of SSI overpayments, SSA has made recovery of overpaid benefits a high priority. Despite these efforts, further improvements in overpayment recovery are possible.