Social Security employees mishandled 79 of 125 sampled requests from people asking SSA to explain an overpayment, according to a September 4 audit by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General. That is 63 percent. The same audit found that 46 percent of the overpayment notices it reviewed did not meet SSA’s own policy.
An overpayment is money Social Security says it paid someone by mistake and now wants back. The notice is the letter that tells a person how much and why.
The 30 days that matter
For anyone holding one of these letters, the clock matters more than the audit. Social Security’s overpayments page says to pay within 30 days of getting the letter. A person who wants to ask for a waiver or appeal has to do that before the 30 days end, and collection will not start until SSA decides the case.
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The same page says a person who cannot afford the current repayment amount can ask to lower it by completing Form SSA-634, the Request for Change in Overpayment Recovery Rate. SSA mails a decision. People who no longer receive benefits can call and ask for a payment plan, and can ask whether the debt can be settled.
The audit shows why a person might need to ask. When a notice leaves out the waiver or reconsideration language, the person may never learn those options exist. The report’s first recommendation is that employees use templates so every notice includes Form SSA-3105 and the reconsideration and waiver language.
What the audit looked at
The report, titled OASDI Overpayment Notices, covers Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, the programs behind retirement, survivor and disability checks. The inspector general’s auditors asked two questions: did SSA write overpayment notices as its policy requires, and did staff handle requests for an explanation correctly?
The full report is dated September 1 and addressed to Commissioner Frank Bisignano. The auditors drew samples from overpayments SSA set up in fiscal year 2023, using one 5-percent slice of the agency’s Master Beneficiary Record. Their projections carry a 90-percent confidence level.
Michelle L. Anderson, the Assistant Inspector General for Audit, said in the release: “Clear, accurate, and understandable notices are essential to helping beneficiaries determine what happened.” She added that people “deserve precise, complete, and easy-to-comprehend information” when they get one.
The 79 of 125 finding
Auditors looked at 125 overpayments where the record showed someone had asked for an explanation. That sample came from 559 such cases in the slice, which the auditors project to about 11,180 requests across SSA. Of the 125, 46 were handled correctly and 79 were not. Those 79 cases contained 86 errors.
Projected across the whole program, the report estimates about 7,060 explanation requests were handled wrongly.
The most common error was misuse of a system indicator that flags an explanation request. Staff misused it in 56 cases, or 45 percent. In 45 of those they used it to pause collection while waiting for forms or decisions, to process claimed repayments or to correct records. In 11 they applied it after the person had already agreed to have benefits withheld.
Another 22 cases, about 18 percent, lacked proper documentation. The report says a required record screen can be skipped by typing a single character. In 8 cases the written explanation itself was deficient: six left out required details and two reissued the first notice with appeal rights that should not have been there.
Someone asking “why do I owe this?” is the person who most needs a straight answer. The audit found that in about two of every three sampled cases, the request was not processed the way policy says.
What was wrong with the notices
On the notices themselves, auditors reviewed 126 overpayments from a pool of 50,948 set up in fiscal 2023. Of those, 68 met policy and 58 did not. Projected across the pool of about 1.02 million overpayments, the report estimates 469,040 notices fell short.
- 30 notices were missing required information, such as how and why the overpayment happened, how it was calculated, or the person’s rights to ask for reconsideration or a waiver.
- 26 contained inaccurate or conflicting information. Twenty of those were system-generated, and 11 of the system notices had conflicting language in the explanation or the calculation charts.
- Eight overpayments, 6 percent, had no evidence that any notice was sent to the person who owed the money.
In one case a notice went to the wrong person, and SSA wrongly withheld that person’s benefits, the report says. A waiver asks SSA to forgive the debt. Reconsideration asks SSA to take a second look.
The OIG found that all 17 manually written notices that used SSA’s templates contained the right language. The six manual notices that left out the reconsideration and waiver language had not used templates.
Slow answers and what SSA will change
Some requests also sat for a long time. As of June 2026, 11 sampled explanation requests, 9 percent, had been pending more than 900 days. SSA has no standard time limit for answering them, so the auditors did not count this as a policy violation. The report notes that collection stays suspended while a request is pending.
The inspector general made six recommendations. They call for requiring employees to use notice templates, adding controls that flag likely errors in manual notices, updating system-generated notices, limiting the explanation indicator to uses policy allows, requiring staff to complete the record screen, and clarifying what employees must write down when someone asks for an explanation.
SSA agreed with all six. The Office of Audit asked the agency for a corrective action plan within 60 days of the report.
Is the overpayment notice in your mailbox complete?
The audit found notices that left out the reason for the debt, the math and the right to ask for a waiver or reconsideration. A reader who misses the 30-day window on a letter like that can see collection begin.
The Social Security Check Protection Kit covers what to do the day a payment is short, wrong or hit by an overpayment notice. It includes the three SSA forms that stop or pause collection (SSA-561, SSA-632, SSA-634) and an overpayment response worksheet for keeping track of what was sent and when.
More Financial Reading
- 21 Ways to Stretch a $2,087 Social Security Check
- 15 Places to Find Your Share of the $4.25 Billion States Give Back
- 15 Steps to Stop the Scams That Took $7.7 Billion From Seniors
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
