Supplemental Security Income

The Supplemental Security Income program, which provides cash benefits to the aged, the blind, and the disabled, could be run more efficiently. More importantly, millions of dollars in overpayments could be prevented or detected quickly if information were available on-line during eligibility assessments. GAO estimates that direct on-line access to state computerized income information could have prevented or quickly detected more than $131 million in overpayments caused by unreported or underreported income nationwide in one 12-month period. However, in Social Security Administration (SSA) field offices where direct access to computerized state information has been implemented, SSA claims representatives did not use it to detect overpayments. The claims representatives did use it to process claims more efficiently, and SSA's preliminary results have shown that its use has reduced administrative expenses. Establishing on-line access between SSA field offices and state agency databases would require only minimal computer programming in most states; some states would need additional hardware, such as computer lines.

GAO found that the use of online access to state-maintained income data could: (1) improve the administration of the SSI program by cutting the time needed to verify client information; (2) prevent or detect overpayments due to underreported and unreported benefit income; (3) replace the current computer-matching system that relies on old data; (4) enable necessary security measures to protect client confidentiality; and (5) be inexpensively implemented nationwide with minimal programming.

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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