Reducing Improper Payments

This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures.

Reducing Improper Payments / Introduction / RSDI and SSI Recovery Efforts

RSDI and SSI Recovery Efforts

Modernizing Debt Management

We continue to make improvement in other aspects of our debt collection program. In FY 2018, we began modernization efforts to build a new DMS. This information technology (IT) investment is a multi year effort that will build a new comprehensive overpayment system enabling us to record, track, collect, and report our overpayments more efficiently. We will also automate overpayment waiver determinations, where appropriate, to enhance controls surrounding waiver determinations.

  • The new DMS will also expand the Non-Entitled Debtors (NED) program to collect debts from debtors who have never been entitled to OASDI benefits or SSI payments. Currently, NED captures payments made to representative payees after the death of an OASDI beneficiary and overpayments to representative payees prior to the death of the OASDI beneficiary for which the payee is responsible. In addition, we will further implement Section 104 of the Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018 to establish State responsibility for overpayments that occurred for OASDI childhood beneficiaries and SSI child recipients while in State-administered foster care.
  • During the development of the new DMS, we will accommodate the remaining debt collection tools authorized by the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996. These tools include charging administrative fees, penalties, and interest, or indexing of debt to reflect its current value.
  • We anticipate launching the new DMS and transitioning from legacy systems by the end of FY 2022. In FY 2020, we adjusted the launch date from FY 2021 to FY 2022 to focus agency resources on multiple near-term debt management priorities.

Treasury Report on Receivables

  • In FY 2020, we implemented systems enhancements to our OASDI and SSI Treasury Report on Receivables to meet the reporting requirements of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014. We continued to analyze data to ensure we are accurately reporting our receivables. Our new DMS will address our reporting limitations such as the number of OASDI debts that the system bundles and counts as a single debt when an individual has multiple debts.