Social Security is taking steps to ease overpayment enforcements on people who were improperly paid Social Security benefits due to the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These types of overpayments are not unusual. Many times when a person is entitled to Social Security benefits, typically benefits for either Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), miscalculations are made and people receive more money than they are due based on the circumstances. When Social Security discovers the payment mistake they will send a letter to the beneficiary informing of the mistake. Social Security will also request for the improperly paid benefits to be paid back. It is important to note that the beneficiary typically is not to blame for the mistake, the mistake was made by Social Security. Both SSDI and SSI are modest benefits, no one is getting rich when they receive these benefits because the benefit amount is much less than the person was receiving while they were working. Getting a letter informing they must pay back a portion of the benefits received can be overwhelming for the beneficiary, especially during a global pandemic in a country where the economy is struggling. That is why Social Security has issued these new regulations to provide some relieve to beneficiaries who have been overpaid by the agency. Below is a summary of the regulations issued by Social Security.
SUMMARY: 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.
DATES: Effective date: This interim final rule is effective on August 27, 2020. Comment date: We invite written comments. Comments must be submitted on or before October 26, 2020.
