Multiple times we have reported on this blog about Republican claims that fraud is rampant within the Social Security disability program, but we have debunked those claims with actually facts. Unfortunately, that has not stopped the Republicans from making these claims as they choose to focus on individual instances of fraud being reported without looking at the entire picture. This may be a good way to get their argument across because it gets people upset and angry, but it also does a disservice to the American people and falsely promotes the idea that fraud within the Social Security disability is a major problem.
The only way to combat false claims is to use facts, and that is exactly what we will do this time. You need to look no further than the recent semi-annual report from Social Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which examined fraud claims from October 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017.
The OIG reported that Social Security received 68,986 allegations of fraud during this time. After an investigation of these claims, the agency opened up 3,758 cases to examine if fraud was committed and in all but 100 of these cases there was no fraud found and the cases closed without finding any wrong doing. That means that from 68,986 allegations only 100 were investigated further. These investigations resulted in 162 arrests. To put this in perspective, the 100 cases that were investigated where fraud was found resulted in 0.14 percent of all allegations.
We have already reported previously that fraud is present in less than 1 percent of all Social Security disability cases and this report backs that up.
It is the OIG’s job to provide oversight to Social Security to prevent inefficient or illegal operations at Social Security and this independent report found fraud to be almost non-existent. The Republicans can keep talking about individual cases of fraud all they want, but they can’t hide from these facts.
