SSI Fraud Protection

To address the protection of social security beneficiaries from payment system fraud, the Social Security Protection Act was signed into law. To make sure that the recipients are paid the appropriate monthly benefits and to avoid overpayments on supplementary security income, the SSI Fraud Protection program was enacted.

The new law will allow SSA to re-issue benefits to beneficiaries whose funds have been misused by organizational representative payees, and to closely monitor the representative payees that include periodic on-site monitoring on different organizations and agencies. Any payee that is not a government agency may be held liable for any misuse of social security funds and that the recovered amounts must be refunded to the beneficiary.

The new law necessitated to place the SSI Fraud Protection program under the "High Risk" category by the General Accounting Office (GAO). Due to an increased number of reports of abuse by GAO with people who are receiving disability checks due to drug addiction or alcoholism, the new law had eliminated drug addicts and alcoholics from the program. Also, the new law will deter any payments made to recipients who are not residents of the United States and who have committed residency violations.

The SSA Commissioner was also given the power to impose civil monetary penalty and an assessment on individuals who knowingly provide false information or knowingly withhold information to obtain social security or disability benefits. The civil monetary penalty may be up to $5000 for each violation and the assessment may be up to twice the amount of benefits wrongfully paid to the individual.

The SSI Fraud Protection program will also make technical and other necessary improvements to ensure proper and prompt delivery of cash benefits to the beneficiaries and make sure to impose penalties on organizations found to misuse its beneficiary's social security benefits. The SSA will also treat misused benefits as "overpayments" to representative payees, allowing the authority of SSA to recover the misused money thru tax refund offsets and offsets of any future federal benefits.

For more information regarding SSI Fraud Protection, you can visit the Social Security Website at www.ssa.gov