2019 Annual Report of the SSI Program

II. Highlights

The SSI program is a nationwide Federal assistance program administered by SSA that guarantees a minimum level of income for aged, blind, or disabled individuals. This section presents highlights of recent SSI program experience, a summary of important legislative changes to the program in the last year, a discussion of current issues facing the SSI program, and a summary of the key results from the 25-year projections.

A. Recent Program Experience

SSI program experience during the past year included the following:

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During calendar year 2018, 1.5 million individuals applied for SSI benefits based on blindness or disability, a decrease of 5 percent from 2017. Additionally, 128 thousand individuals applied for SSI benefits based on age, a decrease of 10 percent as compared to the 142 thousand who applied in 2017. In 2018, 720 thousand applicants became new recipients of SSI benefits, a decrease of 6 percent as compared to the 768 thousand who became new recipients in 2017.

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Each month on average during calendar year 2018, 8.0 million individuals received Federal SSI benefits. This group was composed of 1.1 million aged recipients and 6.9 million blind or disabled recipients, of which 66 thousand were blind. Of these 6.9 million blind or disabled recipients, 1.2 million were under age 18, and 1.0 million were aged 65 or older. During calendar year 2018, 8.9 million aged, blind, or disabled individuals received at least 1 month’s Federal SSI benefit.

•	Federal expenditures for payments under the SSI program in calendar year 2018 totaled $55.2 billion, up from $54.6 billion in 2017.

•

Each month on average during calendar year 2018, 1.5 million individuals received federally administered State supplementation payments. This group was composed of 411 thousand aged recipients, 1.1 million disabled recipients, and 20 thousand blind recipients. During calendar year 2018, 1.6 million individuals received at least 1 month of State supplementation payment.

•	State expenditures for federally administered State supplements, excluding fees for Federal administration totaled $2.6 billion in calendar year 2018, roughly the same level as in 2017.

•	In fiscal year (FY) 2018, 96 percent of SSI recipients received their benefits electronically, roughly the same level as in 2017.

•	The cost the Social Security Administration (SSA) incurred to administer the SSI program in FY 2018 was $4.3 billion, which was roughly 8 percent of total federally administered SSI expenditures.1

•	In January 2019, 8.1 million individuals received federally administered monthly SSI benefits averaging $565. Of these, 8.0 million received monthly Federal SSI payments averaging $549, and 1.5 million received monthly State supplementation payments averaging $146.

B. SSI Legislation Since The 2018 Annual Report

Since we submitted the 2018 Annual Report of the Supplemental Security Income Program to the President and Congress on July 31, 2018, there have been no legislative changes made to the SSI program.

C. Current Issues Facing The SSI Program

For more than 40 years, the SSI program has provided a safety net for aged, blind, and disabled Americans who have nowhere else to turn, and who must rely on SSI benefits to meet basic needs of food and shelter. The program plays a crucial role in the lives of over eight million Americans and is funded from general tax revenues. Accordingly, we take great care to administer the program as accurately and efficiently as possible and remain committed to effectively overseeing the program, protecting taxpayer dollars, and maintaining the public's trust.

Program Integrity

We strive to prevent improper payments—either paying too much (overpayments) or paying too little (underpayments)—and to find, correct, and recover improper payments as soon as possible when they occur.

Making correct payments is especially challenging because SSI is a means-tested program. Accordingly, the correct monthly SSI payment amount changes as a recipient’s income, resources, living arrangements, and other circumstances change. The first line of defense against improper payments is timely reporting of these changing circumstances. We require recipients to report changes that may affect their benefits right away. However, some circumstances, such as the recipients’ medical impairment, may make reporting changes in a timely manner difficult. For this reason, it is important we have strong program integrity tools to detect unreported changes that may affect SSI eligibility and payment. These tools help us ensure that only individuals who are eligible for benefits receive them, and that we pay eligible individuals correctly.

One of our most effective program integrity tools is the SSI non-medical redetermination process, under which we conduct scheduled reviews of all nonmedical factors of eligibility to determine whether the recipient is still eligible for SSI and if his or her payment amount is correct. These reviews are often time-consuming and resource-intensive, therefore it would be administratively challenging and burdensome to complete scheduled redeterminations on each SSI recipient every year; consequently, to maximize resources and limit the burden on the public, we use a statistical model to prioritize redeterminations.

This allows us to focus on recipients who are most likely to have a change that affects eligibility or the amount of benefits. These redeterminations save billions of program dollars with a comparatively small investment of administrative funds. Based on the program integrity funding available, we expect to complete about 2.8 million SSI non-medical redeterminations in FY 2019. The President's proposed FY 2020 Budget would provide funding sufficient to complete about 2.8 million SSI redeterminations in FY 2020.² Our estimates indicate that those redeterminations would yield about $3 of net Federal SSI and Medicaid savings over the first 10 years on average per $1 budgeted to conduct those reviews.

Ongoing Efforts
We continue to rely heavily on emerging technology to support our efforts to review recipient eligibility. For example, we use the Access to Financial Institutions (AFI) process to identify excess resources in bank accounts of SSI applicants and recipients by electronically checking for known and potentially unreported accounts directly with the financial institution. We also use a process to detect and verify when SSI recipients own real property (e.g., houses other than their primary residence) that they have not reported to us, a leading cause of improper payments in the program. We have integrated this functionality into our SSI claims-taking and non-medical redetermination systems to ensure technicians can immediately use the data to determine eligibility and payment amount.

The SSI Telephone Wage Reporting System (SSITWR) is another important tool we use to reduce improper payments. It is an automated, toll-free telephone number that allows recipients and representative payees to report wages by calling in and using either voice recognition or touchtone software.

We also have a mobile application that allows individuals to make monthly wage reports through an Android or iPhone smartphone. By entering information through a series of easily followed prompts, recipients can quickly and efficiently report wages from wherever they are. We expect these tools will help reduce improper SSI payments by making it easier for recipients to comply with reporting requirements.

Our most recent wage reporting tool is myWageReport (myWR). It is a tool located behind the mySocialSecurity portal that allows SSI recipients, the parents and spouses of SSI recipients, Social Security disability beneficiaries, and representative payees to report wages via desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Wage reporters are provided an automated receipt that can be viewed, printed, or saved on their device.

Conclusion

More than 40 years after its implementation, the SSI program continues to provide support for millions of vulnerable individuals. Our goal remains consistent: to pay the right person the right benefit at the right time. We will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that SSI payments are accurate. Moving forward, we will continue to search for ways to simplify the SSI program and to pursue technological improvements, resulting in a program that is easier for the public to understand, more efficient to administer, and that continues to provide critical public assistance.

D. Key Results From The 25-Year Projections

The major findings in the 25-year projections prepared for this report are:

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Following small declines in the SSI recipient population in the late 1990s due to the combined impact of Public Law 104-121 (the Contract With America Advancement Act of 1996) and Public Law 104-193 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), modest growth in the SSI rolls resumed in 2000. The economic recession that began in late 2007 led to faster growth in the SSI recipient population through 2013, but in recent years the SSI recipient population has slightly declined as the number of applicants for SSI payments has continued to decline. We project the number of applications to increase slightly in 2019, and then to resume a modest level of growth which is estimated to continue throughout the remainder of the projection period at a rate somewhat slower than the rate of growth in the U.S. population. By 2043, we estimate that the Federal SSI recipient population will reach 8.7 million. As a percentage of the total U.S. population, we project the number of Federal SSI recipients to decrease very gradually from 2.39 in 2018 to 2.22 percent of the population by 2043.

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We estimate that Federal expenditures for SSI payments in calendar year 2019 will slightly increase by $0.9 billion to $56.1 billion, an increase of 1.7 percent from 2018 levels. In dollars adjusted by the Consumer Price Index to 2019 levels, we pro­ject that SSI program outlays will increase to $61.9 billion in 2043, a real increase of 0.4 percent per year.

•	Federal SSI expenditures were 0.27 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2018. We project that such expenditures will decrease to 0.26 percent of GDP in 2019, and continue to decline thereafter to 0.19 percent of GDP by 2043.

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1

Administrative costs do not include the costs of beneficiary services provided to recipients through State vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies and employment networks for VR services and payments under the Ticket to Work program.

2

In our efforts to accurately pay benefits, we also conduct medical continuing disability reviews (CDR). CDRs are periodic reviews of a recipient's medical impairment to determine if he or she is still disabled according to the statute. Generally, the cases with the highest likelihood of medical improvement receive a full medical review, whereas, the remaining cases due for review receive a mailer requesting updates on their impairments, medical treatment, and work activities, subject to available administrative funding.