By Daisy Brown, Legislative Liaison, TSCL

Each year, about 1 million Americans receive a bill in the mail from Social Security due to an overpayment from miscalculated benefits, according to 60 Minutes. Until this March, you had 30 days to repay the balance or Social Security would begin withholding 100 percent of payments until you did.

However, the program’s commissioner changed that policy to withhold only 10 percent of benefits or $10, whichever is greater. Now, even more improvements to the program’s repayment policy may be on the horizon.

A new bill proposed in the House of Representatives on May 7, the Social Security Overpayment Fairness Act, would extend the period before Social Security started imposing penalties after notifying a beneficiary of overpayment from 30 days to 120 days.

“While the Social Security Administration is required by law to attempt to recover  overpayments … seniors are being negatively impacted by overpayment notices that aren’t their fault,” said Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo, one of the bill’s sponsors in a public statement. In his own statement, the bill’s other sponsor, Congressman Colin Allred, added that the new bill would “provide flexibility and extend the time beneficiaries have before they have to repay overpayments and their benefits are intercepted.”

The bill would also require the Social Security Administration to identify changes that would decrease the frequency of overpayments and streamline the recovery process. Six months after it passed, the Commissioner of Social Security would have to submit a report to Congress on its approach to identifying and recouping overpaid benefits.

The report would have to address six core requirements:

1. Improving the process to review changes in information reported by beneficiaries (a principal cause of incorrect overpayment notices)
2. Expanding efforts to limit discrepancies from beneficiaries self-reporting information
3. Improving efforts to track overpayments
4. Ensuring the right to due process when recovering overpayments
5. Improving communication with beneficiaries for overpayments
6. Proposing fair benefit withholding amounts to prevent undue financial strain on beneficiaries.

The Senior Citizen’s League supports this bill because it has the potential to help millions of seniors and their families over the coming decades. It would bring about changes that offer seniors who receive overpayments time to build proper plans for repaying the extra funds they received. Additionally, seniors who receive incorrect overpayment notices due to miscalculations—a rare but very frustrating occurrence—would have more time to contest their overpayment notices before seeing their benefits affected. Meanwhile, Social Security would continue to recover overpayments so the bill would not negatively affect the program’s finances.

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