Social Security

Postentitlement services are those provided to Social Security beneficiaries and include replacement of lost or stolen checks, converting spouses to survivors' status, and making address changes to checks. About 64 million postentitlement actions were processed for individuals in 1990 in SSA's retirement, survivors, and disability programs, and another 12 million actions were processed for the supplemental security income program. GAO reviewed SSA's processing of these actions and found that check replacement services could be improved by changing the current policy of delaying missing check claims for two weeks and instead processing the claims more quickly. Procedures also contribute to delays in the completion of spouse conversions to survivors' status. In GAO's opinion, SSA's practice of not providing election forms to all currently entitled spouses with dual entitlement until much later in the processing cycle should be changed.

GAO found that: (1) SSA receives 500,000 reports a year from beneficiaries claiming that they did not receive their monthly benefit checks; (2) when SSA processed claims for lost or stolen checks on a priority basis, 89 percent of the affected beneficiaries received replacement checks in less than 1 month; (3) when SSA followed normal processing procedures, beneficiaries received only 1 percent of all lost checks in less than 1 month; (4) SSA normally delays submitting the nonreceipt claims to Treasury to allow original checks time to clear the banking system; (5) SSA believes that if it reduced the 15-day delay in submitting nonreceipt claims to Treasury, the risk of losses from overpayment would be minimal; (6) in some cases, SSA can convert the currently entitled spouse's benefit to the survivor's benefit; (7) if the spouse is entitled to dual benefits, additional processing by SSA is required; (8) SSA received 4.5 million requests for changes of address during fiscal year 1991; and (9) generally, beneficiaries reporting address changes to SSA will have their next month's check addressed to the new location.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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