Justina Worrell, 47, works part-time as a kitchen helper in an Ohio nursing home. She has cerebral palsy, an intellectual disability, and a cardiac condition that required she get an artificial heart valve at age 20.
A year ago, she was earning $862 a month and receiving about $1,065 in monthly Social Security disability benefits when a letter arrived from the federal government. The Social Security Administration had been overpaying her, the letter said, and wanted money back.
Within 30 days, it said, she should mail the government a check or money order.
For $60,175.90.
“Social Security should be to help people, not to destroy them,” Addie Arnold, Worrell’s aunt and caregiver, told KFF Health News and WHIO-TV in Dayton, Ohio.
The Social Security Administration is trying to reclaim billions of dollars from many of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable — payments it sent them but now says they never should have received.
During the 2022 fiscal year, the agency clawed back $4.7 billion of overpayments, while another $21.6 billion remained outstanding, according to a report by SSA’s inspector general.
One consequence is a costly collection effort for the government and a potentially devastating ordeal for the beneficiary.
“We have an overpayment crisis on our hands,” said Rebecca Vallas, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank. “Overpayments push already struggling beneficiaries even deeper into poverty and hardship, which is directly counterproductive to the goals” of safety-net programs.
The Social Security Administration declined an interview request from KFF Health News and Cox Media Group and would field questions only submitted by email.
The agency declined to say how many people have been asked to repay overpayments.
“We do not report on the number of debtors,” spokesperson Nicole Tiggemann said in a statement.
The agency rejected a May 2022 Freedom of Information Act request for documentation of every overpayment notice sent over several years, and a March 2023 appeal is pending.
Jack Smalligan of the Urban Institute, who has done research on Social Security, estimated that millions of people have received notices saying the agency overpaid them.
Most are on disability, and many cannot afford to repay the government, Smalligan said.
Overpayments can result from Social Security making a mistake or from beneficiaries failing to comply with requirements, intentionally or otherwise. But much of the fault lies within the system — for example:
- Rules are complex and hard to follow.
- Limits on what beneficiaries can save or own have not been adjusted for inflation in decades.
- The Social Security Administration does not have adequate staffing to keep up with its workload, much of which is done by hand.
- The system has built-in lags in checking information such as beneficiaries’ income and relies heavily on data submitted by beneficiaries themselves.
That’s the picture that emerges from agency employees, advocates for the disabled, policy research, SSA publications, reports by the inspector general, records of individual cases, and interviews with more than a dozen people in five states who received repayment notices.
The Social Security Administration is required to be a good steward of the money entrusted to it. That means keeping overpayments to a minimum — and recovering them when they happen, the inspector general has written.
When the agency determines it has overpaid, SSA can ultimately reclaim money from beneficiaries by, for instance, reducing or stopping their monthly benefit payments, garnishing wages, and intercepting federal tax refunds.
The agency tracks its overpayments through quarterly “payment integrity scorecards.” In the most recent scorecard for one Social Security program, the agency said $265 million of overpayments in the 2022 fiscal year were “within the agency’s control.” In other words, the agency blamed itself.
“We were aware of information but failed to take action, or we took incorrect action when the recipient or third-party provided requested information,” the scorecard said.
A much larger source of overpayments in that program, the agency said, was that beneficiaries did not report information, such as changes in their wages or assets.
By the time the agency catches a mistake, years can pass. In the meantime, the beneficiary is likely to have spent the money, and the amount involved can grow to overwhelming proportions.
“We understand getting notice of an overpayment may be unsettling or unclear and we work with people to navigate the overpayment process,” Tiggemann, the agency spokesperson, said by email.
The agency’s payment accuracy is high, Tiggemann said, but given the volume of payments it issues — almost $1.2 trillion in the 2021 fiscal year — “even small error rates add up to substantial improper payment amounts.”
Tiggemann noted that the SSA is developing a program to tap payroll data from outside sources. The agency plans to use that information “when appropriate” to automatically adjust the amounts it pays beneficiaries, she said.
Congress authorized that project almost eight years ago.
Tangled Safety Nets
When people hear “Social Security,” they may think of retirement benefits — the monthly payments the government issues to millions of retired workers and surviving family members under the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance program.
But the Social Security Administration does much more than issue those checks, and its clawbacks for overpayment commonly involve payments under other programs with complicated eligibility requirements.
With certain benefits, how much money — if any — beneficiaries are due each month can change as their circumstances change.
Most of the overpayments involve the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides money to people with little or no income or other resources who are disabled, blind, or at least 65.
In the 2021 fiscal year, more than 7% of that program’s outlays were overpayments, according to the agency’s most recent annual financial report.
Some overpayments involve the Disability Insurance program, which assists disabled workers and their dependents.
Lori Cochran, a beneficiary disabled by multiple sclerosis, said she got tripped up by a life insurance policy she took over from her mother.
After she reviewed her finances with a Social Security representative, she recounted, she received a letter saying she owed $27,000.
“I started having, like, heart palpitations,” she recalled.
Cochran said she didn’t know the insurance policy had a cash value of $4,000.
The agency told her that, for every month she held the policy, she wasn’t entitled to any of her $914 monthly benefit, she said. The agency said it would recoup the $27,000 by deducting $91.40 from each of her future checks. At that rate, she would be paying it back “way into my elderly age,” she told WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh.
Cochran has asked SSA to reconsider. In the meantime, she cashed out the life insurance policy — only to learn that, instead, she could have signed a paper saying she had no intention of cashing it out.
“So now I’m left with no life insurance,” she said. “When I die, my daughter will have no money to bury me.”
A ‘Kafkaesque Minefield’
If beneficiaries believe that an overpayment wasn’t their fault, that the claim is unfair, or that paying the money back would cause hardship, they can ask the SSA to waive repayment.
They can also negotiate to repay what they owe gradually.
Cheryl Bates-Harris of the National Disability Rights Network recommended that people who receive overpayment notices appeal, because the information in the notices may be inaccurate.
But trying to resolve an overpayment involves plunging into a “Kafkaesque minefield,” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health care policy at the Arc, which advocates for people with disabilities.
Another beneficiary named Lori described her journey through the minefield on the condition that her last name be withheld. She provided a copy of an administrative law judge’s ruling in her case.
In 2017, SSA informed her that, since 2000, she had been overpaid $126,612, according to the judge’s ruling.
“I almost threw up when I opened that letter,” she said. “Myself and my husband were like, we were like frantic.”
According to the judge’s ruling, the government based its calculation on her receipt of workers’ compensation benefits as well as disability benefits. She argued that she had told the SSA about the workers’ comp. Lori worked for the U.S. Postal Service until she injured her back in 1993.
As her struggle unfolded, the government reduced her monthly benefit checks and then stopped them. She and her husband sold their car and their house and moved from Florida to Georgia, where the cost of living was lower.
“[I had] no money in my bank account for the first time in my life… I didn’t want [the government] to reach in and grab it,” she told WFTV-TV in Orlando.
She said she ran up credit card debt and called lawyer after lawyer but was told no attorney would help because there was no money to be made from a Social Security case. Then she found one through legal aid.
After six years of battling SSA, including multiple appeals, Lori prevailed. An administrative judge ruled in her favor and wiped away the debt.
Lori had spent her benefit money in the belief she was entitled to it, the judge wrote, and “requiring repayment would be against equity and good conscience.”
A family in Covington, Georgia, had a similar experience.
In 2018, Matt Cooper was shot in the face while working as a police officer there. Since then, he and his wife, Kristen, have depended on Social Security payments to help support their two young children.
“Every decision that we made for our family was based on the benefits that we were supposed to receive,” Kristen Cooper, told WSB-TV in Atlanta.
But the Social Security Administration recently demanded the family pay back $30,000 and reduced the children’s benefits. Cooper said the agency failed to correctly include her husband’s workers’ compensation in its calculations.
“Situations like this come up and it just brings back a level of anger and just the need to protect my family,” said Cooper. “The system has definitely let us down.”
Too Late
Alex Hubbard, 30, has autism and said he works in a mailroom to keep busy.
“I like to be busy because I don’t want to be bored at home,” he told KIRO-TV in Seattle.
In 2019, Hubbard received an overpayment notice for $11,111.43.
“I’m supposed to report my wages, but I just don’t know how, how it works,” said the Seattle resident.
The agency has cut off his benefits, Hubbard said, but it would have been better if it stopped them before he owed all that money.
“They should have let me know, like, years back that I owed back that much,” Hubbard said.
Now, the agency is trying to collect the money from his mother, who is unable to manage his benefits since having a stroke, Hubbard said.
Dealing with the Social Security Administration can be exasperating, beneficiaries said.
Letters from the agency don’t provide clear explanations, and, if people on the receiving end of overpayment notices can get through to a human, agency employees give inconsistent answers, beneficiaries said.
SSA employees interviewed for this article, speaking as union leaders, said they can relate.
Beneficiaries “struggle getting through to an agency that has all but become non-responsive to the public at this point due to understaffing,” said Jessica LaPointe, a claims specialist in SSA’s Madison, Wisconsin, field office and president of a union council representing Social Security employees.
Tiggemann, the agency spokesperson, cited the challenge of “staffing losses and resource constraints” in her written statement.
In a March 2023 budget message, SSA’s acting commissioner, Kilolo Kijakazi, said SSA was “rebuilding” its workforce after ending the 2022 fiscal year “at our lowest staffing level in over 25 years.”
New workers need a long time to get up to speed, employees said. Complex rules cause trouble for employees and beneficiaries alike.
Members of the public “often struggle to really understand what they’re supposed to report,” LaPointe said.
Rules for the Beneficiaries
Disability benefits are meant for people who can’t do a lot of work.
For disabled people who aren’t blind, the government generally draws a line at earning $1,470 or more per month.
It’s not just bank balances or paycheck amounts and the like that can affect a person’s benefits. In the SSI program, if a family member gives them meals or a place to stay, that can count as “in-kind support.”
Part of the trouble with SSI, critics say, is that limits on the assets that beneficiaries are allowed to hold without forfeiting benefits haven’t been adjusted since 1989. The asset limits stand at $2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for couples.
Had the asset limits been indexed for inflation since 1972, when the program was created, they would be almost five times as much as they are today, according to a July 2023 report by researchers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Maintaining eligibility for SSI benefits leaves people with little money to fall back on — let alone to repay a large debt to the government.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill on Sept. 12 to raise the limits.
The SSDI and SSI programs include rules meant to encourage people to work. However, “if beneficiaries attempt work, they are likely to be confronted with an overpayment, and it is likely to be large,” Smalligan and Chantel Boyens of the Urban
Institute said in a March 2023 report commissioned by the Social Security Advisory Board.
‘In a Very Bad Place’
Justina Worrell’s aunt and caregiver Addie Arnold, 69, who took her in when she was orphaned as a child, said neither of them has $60,175.90 to repay the government.
The August 2022 letter demanding repayment of that amount was not the first or the last word they have received from the Social Security Administration about possible payment errors. The matter involves two streams of benefits — one from the account of Worrell’s deceased father, and another related to her disability, Arnold said.
“I’ve been confused ever since this started,” she said.
A February 2023 letter from the SSA claiming to explain how “we paid her [Worrell] $7,723.40 too much in benefits” includes difficult-to-decipher data going back to 1996.
TThe SSA has dropped its claim on some of the more than $60,000 it sought a year ago, but most remains outstanding, Arnold said.
Arnold believes part of the problem is that Worrell’s employer asked her to work additional hours at the nursing home, where she runs a dishwasher and carries trays.
“She is so afraid of losing her job that she will do whatever they ask her to do. That is part of her mental state,” Arnold wrote in a letter appealing to the Social Security Administration.
“I truly do hope and pray that she is allowed to stay on SSI,” Arnold wrote, “because she has to continue to live and without it she will be in a very bad place.”
Millions of Americans are currently living on a fixed income, and their biggest safety net to pay basic living expenses is Social Security.
A Channel 9 investigation found that families across the country are getting bills from the federal government.
According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), more than $20 billion was given out to Americans who should not have received that money; now the agency wants it back.
In most cases, the recipient had no idea that their payments were wrong, and in some cases, it was the government’s mistake. Now, the SSA is asking them to pay back thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands, in an attempt to fix the error.
Matt and Kristin Cooper have spent the last five years working hard to fix their financial situation for themselves and their two young children.
“It’s opening up wounds that we had already healed,” Kristen Cooper told our sister station WSB-TV. “And then here we are now having to fight them again.”
“It’s hard to actually heal and get better when you have to keep revisiting this. The worst day of your life,” Matt Cooper said.
Matt Cooper is a former Covington, Georgia police officer. About five years ago, he was shot between the eyes while on duty responding to a shoplifting call. Following his injury, Social Security payments for Matt and his kids, coupled with workers’ compensation, are now major factors in the family’s monthly budget.
“Every decision that we made for our family was based on the benefits that we were supposed to receive,” Kristen Cooper said.
Recently, the couple was sent a surprise letter from the SSA demanding the Cooper family pay back $30,000. According to Kristen, an employee at her local SSA office told her the agency failed to correctly factor in Matt’s workers’ compensation in its calculation.
In addition to the repayment, monthly payouts to the couple’s children have been cut, dropping from $900 to $150.
“We had submitted all the appropriate documentation with Matt and the children, and she was in agreement that, yes, we had done everything correctly,” Kristen said. “But sometimes their system just doesn’t pick up on it until later.”
Rebecca Vallas has been handling overpayment investigations for years as an attorney with Legal Aid. She said that even in cases where the agency is at fault, they still demand that money back.
“The reality is you can do everything right and still get hit by a massive overpayment from Social Security,” Vallas said. “It’s happening every single day to people all around us across this country.”
For over a year, Channel 9 has been reaching out and asking the SSA how many people have been overpaid. Just this week, the agency said it would not release that information, but we found agency audits that show at least hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—have been impacted by this mistake.
Angela Digeronimo, a Social Security worker and employee union leader, says overpayments have been happening for years and are mainly caused by critically low staffing levels. The lack of personnel also means it can be multiple years before workers can reassess cases, catch overpayments, and send notice; during that time, the amount people owe continues to grow.
“It’s our responsibility to let them know,” Digeronimo said. “But it’s also the public’s responsibility to let us know when there are changes and they know what their reporting responsibilities are.”
Low staffing can also mean that some who try to report a change in their income or disability can’t get through to SSA call centers. At the end of the day, Social Security views that money as taxpayer dollars that belong to all of us.
“We take an oath to be stewards of the trust fund,” Jessica LaPointe, another Social Security worker and employee union leader, said. “So unfortunately, we do have to collect overpayments or attempt to collect overpayments when somebody from the public has been overpaid.”
The SSA says families are allowed to appeal their overpayment bills if they believe it’s an error or they weren’t at fault. If the amount creates too much hardship, recipients can also ask for a waiver or payment plan.
The Cooper family’s appeal was already denied; they’re not hoping for a waiver.
“Eight years in the Army, I did two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to come home to be a police officer,” Matt Cooper said. “I just feel like I’m doing so much for other people that now it’s time for me to get help. And I’m just, it’s just an uphill battle constantly. It’s hard to heal.”
The SSA declined Channel 9′s request for an interview, but they did provide this statement:
“We continually strive to improve stewardship of our programs and reduce improper payments. While staffing losses and resource constraints have challenged our service delivery, our payment accuracy rates remain very high.
We understand getting notice of an overpayment may be unsettling or unclear and we work with people to navigate the overpayment process. When overpayments occur, we inform people about the fact and amount of the overpayment, their right to appeal, and the options to repay or (in some cases) receive waivers for the overpayment debts. People can appeal an overpayment if they disagree with the overpayment debt decision or the overpayment amount. They also have the right to ask Social Security to waive collection of their debt if they believe the overpayment was not their fault and they cannot afford to pay it back. We do not pursue recoveries while an initial appeal or waiver is pending. We examine each waiver request to determine if the individual caused the debt and their ability to repay the debt. If we can’t waive the debt, we have flexible repayment options—including repayment of as low as $10 per month.
Our payment accuracy rates are high, yet even small error rates add up to substantial improper payment amounts, given the magnitude of the benefits we pay each year. For instance, in fiscal year 2021, we issued nearly $1.2 trillion in benefit payments. Our Social Security Retirement, Survivors, and Disability benefit payment accuracy is consistently high—less than 0.5 percent of Social Security payments are overpayments. For the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, overpayments also represent a small percentage of payments—about 7 percent—but are higher than our overall payment accuracy rate partially due to the complexity in administering income and resource limits and asset evaluations.
Nonetheless, Congress recognized that beneficiaries will be overpaid. Therefore, consistent with our stewardship responsibilities, Social Security is required by law to adjust benefits or recover debts when we establish that someone received payments to which they are not entitled and an overpayment occurs. We must maintain our responsibilities to taxpayers to be good stewards of the trust funds. Each person’s situation is unique, and we handle overpayments on a case-by-case basis. Overpayments can occur for many reasons, such as when a beneficiary does not timely report work or other changes that can affect their benefits.
Improving our business processes to serve our customers better remains a top priority. We are making better use of data and technology to prevent some overpayments. We continue to invest in improvements to make it easier for people to interact with us so we can prevent overpayments. For instance, we are developing a new electronic payroll data exchange program that will automatically use wage information to adjust payment amounts when appropriate, which will help reduce improper payments and reporting responsibilities for beneficiaries.
We are also working to streamline and simplify our waiver request form to make it easier to understand and less burdensome for people to request a debt waiver. Through proposed rulemaking, we plan to propose to simplify our rules for how a person can demonstrate eligibility for a waiver of recovery of an overpayment debt. We do not report on the number of debtors.”
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Contributing Reporters:
- Josh Wade, Cox Media Group
- Justin Gray, WSB-TV, Atlanta
- John Bedell, WHIO-TV, Dayton
- Shannon Butler, WFTV-TV, Orlando
- Amy Hudak, WPXI-TV, Pittsburgh
- Jesse Jones, KIRO-TV, Seattle
- Ted Daniel, WFXT-TV, Boston
- Madison Carter, WSOC-TV, Charlotte
- Ben Becker, WJAX-TV, Jacksonville
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