If you have received a notice that Social Security has overpaid you benefits that you were not entitled to do not panic. It is natural to develop some anxiety when you get a letter in the mail indicating you owe money, but Social Security put in new procedures regarding overpayment matters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A new rule was enacted August 27, 2020 in an effort to protect people who owe overpayments during the pandemic. This protection lasts at least through the end of 2020. It is likely this will be extended because no credible experts believe the pandemic is going away any time soon. Below is a summary of the recent regulatory action taken by Social Security.
We are issuing this interim final rule with request for comments to revise our regulations on how we waive the recovery of certain overpayment debts. We will apply this interim final rule when an affected beneficiary requests waiver of certain overpayment debts that accrued during a portion of the COVID-19 pandemic period. Under this rule, we may waive recovery of these overpayment debts using a streamlined internal process. Since the overpayment debts at issue occurred because of the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 national public health emergency, we can assume that these debts are not the fault of the affected beneficiaries due directly to our strategic decision to reprioritize workloads to stop manually processing certain actions, and it would be against equity and good conscience to collect them. In particular, qualifying overpayment debts include those incurred between March 1 to September 30, 2020 that we did not manually process as a result of our cession of certain activities, and that we identified by December 31. We expect that this interim final rule will allow us to maintain effective stewardship of the Social Security programs, while simultaneously ensuring that affected beneficiaries are not disadvantaged by our actions during this unprecedented national public health emergency.
