A May 2026 audit from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general found that agency employees failed to properly record or monitor millions of dollars in court-ordered restitution owed by people convicted of Social Security fraud. Auditors sampled restitution cases ordered between fiscal years 2018 and 2023 and used the results to estimate that SSA employees did not properly record or monitor approximately $18.6 million in restitution agency-wide — money owed back to the Social Security trust funds that the agency’s own systems were not tracking. The findings largely repeat a problem SSA’s inspector general had already flagged once before, in 2019.
Auditors Sampled 66 Cases From a Pool of 1,506
When a court convicts someone of Social Security fraud, it can order that person to repay SSA for the benefits they illegally obtained — a court-ordered restitution. SSA employees are then responsible for recording that restitution and monitoring its collection until the overpayment is fully repaid or otherwise resolved. According to the SSA Office of the Inspector General’s final report, 042302, dated May 26, 2026, auditors pulled a random sample of 66 restitutions from a population of 1,506 ordered in fiscal years 2018 through 2023. SSA employees properly recorded and monitored 43 of those cases, collecting about $2.1 million. The remaining 23 cases — 35 percent of the sample — were not properly recorded, not properly monitored, or both, with $1,097,261 in identified outstanding balances as of January 2025. Projecting that sample across the full population, the OIG put the agency-wide total at $18,625,945, with a 90-percent-confidence range of roughly $10.6 million to $26 million.
Free retirement updates: Enrollment and claim windows come and go, and missing one can cost you real money. The free Retirement Shield newsletter keeps you ahead of the deadlines that matter. Sign up free.
A Restitution Tracking Tool That Never Worked as Intended
This is not the first time SSA’s inspector general has flagged this problem. A 2019 audit found SSA lacked adequate controls to record and monitor restitution collection, and recommended the agency build a tracking tool. SSA implemented one in September 2021, but the new report found the tool was never designed to monitor the status of collections or interface with SSA’s other systems, limiting its usefulness for the purpose it was built to serve. The agency also told auditors in the earlier review that it was updating its restitution policy, but as of December 2025 it still had not issued instructions covering restitutions tied to “incorrect payments” — cases where someone fraudulently received a payment they were never entitled to, as opposed to an overpayment caused by a benefit miscalculation. Nine of the 23 flawed cases in the new sample fell into that unaddressed policy gap.
A Restitution That Was Never Recorded — and a Refund Sent by Mistake
The report includes a case that shows how a recording failure compounds over time. In May 2017, a court ordered an individual to pay SSA approximately $36,000 in restitution, but SSA employees never recorded the debt in the agency’s overpayment-tracking system. Between October 2021 and June 2025, the individual made restitution payments totaling $1,075, but because the overpayment was never recorded, SSA employees mistakenly refunded $425 of those payments back to the person instead of applying the money against what was owed. More than eight years after the court order, the restitution still had not been recorded in SSA’s system until this audit prompted the agency to fix it in August 2025.
Notices Never Sent, and Errors That Carried Over From 2019
Separate from the tracking failures, auditors found SSA employees did not send legally required overpayment notices to 18 of the individuals ordered to pay restitution in the sample — 10 got no notice at all, and 8 received notices that incorrectly told them they could request a waiver, an option restitution debts are not eligible for. In one case cited in the report, a court ordered an individual to pay about $28,300 in restitution in September 2020; SSA never sent an overpayment notice, the individual repaid only $75 and then $174 over the following four years, and as of March 2025 still owed the agency roughly $28,000. Auditors also went back to 10 of the 25 cases the 2019 audit had flagged as errors, to check whether SSA had since fixed them; four still had not been properly recorded or monitored, carrying about $126,221 in combined outstanding balances years after the original audit identified them. “Taxpayers deserve confidence that funds lost through fraud are aggressively pursued and properly recovered,” Michelle L. Anderson, the SSA OIG’s Assistant Inspector General for Audit, said of the findings. The OIG issued three recommendations — to resolve the specific flawed cases identified, review the remaining 1,440 restitutions still sitting in the tracking tool, and identify what is causing the recurring errors — and SSA agreed to implement all three. Auditors conducted the review between January 2025 and April 2026, giving the agency more than a year to begin acting on individual cases even before the final report was published in May.
The Quiet Gaps in the Safety Net
Separately, uncollected restitution is not the only place money slips through the cracks in retirement. Extra Help for prescription drug costs, free home weatherization, and state circuit-breaker property-tax credits are all opt-in programs that require an application before any help arrives.
The Benefits Checklist lays out all 11 covered programs, their 2026 income limits, and a 50-state phone directory for finding the right office.
Compare the eligibility rules in The Benefits Checklist.
This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed for accuracy before publication.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
