2020 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 2019, 1.5 million individuals applied for SSI benefits based on blindness or disability, an increase of less than 1 percent from 2018. Additionally, 127 thousand individuals applied for SSI benefits based on age, a decrease of less than 1 percent as compared to the 128 thousand who applied in 2018. In 2019, 724 thousand applicants became new recipients of SSI benefits, an increase of less than 1 percent as compared to the 720 thousand who became new recipients in 2018.

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Each month on average during calendar year 2019, 7.9 million individuals received Federal SSI benefits. This group was composed of 1.1 million aged recipients and 6.8 million blind or disabled recipients, of which 66 thousand were blind. Of these 6.8 million blind or disabled recipients, 1.1 million were under age 18, and 1.1 million were aged 65 or older. During calendar year 2019, 8.8 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 2019 totaled $56.2 billion, up from $55.2 billion in 2018.

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Each month on average during calendar year 2019, 1.5 million individuals received federally administered State supplementation payments. This group was composed of 408 thousand aged recipients and 1.0 million blind or disabled recipients, of which 19 thousand were blind. Of these 1.0 million blind or disabled recipients, 126 thousand were under age 18, and 260 thousand were aged 65 or older. During calendar year 2019, 1.6 million aged, blind, or disabled individuals received at least 1 month’s State supplementation payment.

•	State expenditures for federally administered State supplements, excluding fees for Federal administration totaled $2.6 billion in calendar year 2019, roughly the same level as in 2018.

•	In fiscal year (FY) 2019, 96 percent of SSI recipients received their benefits electronically, roughly the same level as in 2018.

•	The cost the Social Security Administration (SSA) incurred to administer the SSI program in FY 2019 was $4.4 billion, which was roughly 8 percent of total federally administered SSI expenditures.1

•	In January 2020, 8.0 million individuals received federally administered monthly SSI benefits averaging $575. Of these, 7.9 million received monthly Federal SSI payments averaging $559, and 1.4 million received monthly State supplementation payments averaging $146.

B. SSI Legislation Since The 2019 Annual Report

Since we submitted the 2019 Annual Report of the Supplemental Security Income Program to the President and Congress on May 30, 2019, 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. Because it would be administratively challenging and burdensome to complete scheduled redeterminations on each SSI recipient every year, we use a statistical model to prioritize redeterminations. This allows us to maximize our resources and limit the burden on the public.

This also 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.²

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. In addition to the AFI process, we also use a process to detect and verify when SSI recipients own non-home 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, 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

Consistent with the projections in the 2020 Trustees Report, the projections and analysis in this report do not reflect the potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the SSI and Social Security programs. Given the uncertainty associated with these impacts, we believe that it is not possible to adjust these projections reasonably at this time.

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 declined through 2018 and remained at about 2018 levels in 2019. We project the number of applications to increase slightly in 2020, 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 Social Security area population. By 2044, we estimate that the Federal SSI recipient population will reach 8.4 million. As a percentage of the total Social Security area population, we project the number of Federal SSI recipients to decrease very gradually from 2.37 in 2019 to 2.17 percent of the population by 2044. This occurs for several reasons, including that the percent of the population potentially eligible for SSI based on their citizenship and residency status is projected to decline slightly in the future.

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We estimate that Federal expenditures for SSI payments in calendar year 2020 will slightly increase by $0.7 billion to $56.9 billion, an increase of 1.2 percent from 2019 levels. In dollars adjusted by the Consumer Price Index to 2020 levels, we pro­ject that SSI program outlays will increase to $61.2 billion in 2044, a real increase of 0.3 percent per year.

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Federal SSI expenditures were 0.26 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2019. We project that such expenditures will decrease to 0.25 percent of GDP in 2020, and continue to decline thereafter to 0.18 percent of GDP by 2044. Federal SSI expenditures are projected to grow more slowly than GDP both because the share of the population that will be potentially eligible for SSI will decline and because the maximum federal SSI benefit is projected to grow more slowly on average than the growth in average income in the future

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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.