As many NOSSCR members know, overpayments by the Social Security Administration (SSA) can cause unnecessary hardship to claimants when they are asked to return funds that were erroneously given to them. To address concerns over SSA overpayments, the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means held a hearing on October 18, 2023.

Witnesses included SSA Acting Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi, Tonya Eickman of the SSA Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and Elizabeth Curda of the Government Accountability Office (GAO). NOSSCR’s David Camp, Betsy Osborn, and Daniel LaHue were in attendance.

While Kijakazi maintained that overpayments are rare, a recent SSA Inspector General (IG) report showed that the SSA recovered $4.7 billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2022. Kijakazi said that she had created a team to review the overpayments, but Members of Congress presiding over the hearing were not satisfied with the agency’s response.

Chairman Drew Ferguson (R-GA) was particularly concerned by the fact that the SSA had not yet implemented a system that would allow the agency to collect private payroll data even though Congress granted the authority to implement that system eight years ago. The program, called the payroll information exchange (PIE), is meant to reduce overpayments by allowing timely, automatic reporting of wages received by beneficiaries.

Ferguson zeroed in on the eight-year wait for PIE when he said, “What do you think that timeline is? It just seems eight years on like something’s broken in the system to go from start to eight years, and we still don’t have the program. So how much longer is this going to take?”

Kijakazi responded to Ferguson by explaining that the SSA was still in the rulemaking process for implementing the program and that she did not have a clear sense of when the agency could move forward with using PIE. 

Members of the subcommittee were noticeably frustrated by the slow pace of reform within the SSA that would potentially decrease the incidence of overpayments. Congressman Greg Steube (R-FL) wanted to know who at the agency was taking responsibility for the problem of overpayments. He asked, “Who is being held accountable for the mistakes that the Social Security Administration is making?” Kijakazi responded, “We are holding ourselves accountable.”

You can watch the full hearing here.