The Social Security Administration failed to pay an estimated $291 million in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) underpayments that were owed to recipients, according to a new watchdog report examining millions of unresolved payments. The SSA Office of the Inspector General report, released Friday, found that agency employees did not always take the actions required to resolve underpayments sitting on recipients' records. Based on a statistical sample, auditors estimated that around 1.1 million outstanding underpayments totaling about $291 million had not been paid.
The figure refers to individual underpayments rather than 1.1 million separate people, meaning one recipient could potentially account for more than one payment. Newsweek has contacted the SSA via email for comment. SSI provides monthly payments to people with limited income and resources who are disabled, blind or aged 65 and older.
While it is often associated with disability benefits, it is separate from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is based on a worker's employment record. An average of 7.3 million people received federal SSI payments each month during 2025, including about 6.1 million blind or disabled recipients and 1.1 million recipients qualifying due to their age. An underpayment occurs when the SSA pays someone less than they were entitled to receive, makes no payment when one was due, or issues a correct payment but the recipient dies before cashing the check, the OIG said.
Underpayments can arise when the SSA subsequently changes a recipient's record in a way that increases the amount they should have received for an earlier period, or when an application is approved and retroactive benefits are due. Auditors identified approximately 2.5 million SSI underpayments that were still pending on SSA records as of September 2024. Of those, about 1.14 million related to living recipients and roughly 1.37 million to deceased recipients.
The watchdog then examined a random sample of 160 of those pending underpayments. It found that SSA employees failed to take the required steps to pay 69 of the 160 sampled underpayments. Based on the sample, the OIG estimated that SSA had failed to pay approximately 610,000 underpayments totaling $195.7 million to living SSI recipients, along with around 444,000 underpayments totaling $94.9 million that should have been paid to recipients before they died or, where applicable, to eligible survivors.
Some of the incorrect payments had been left unresolved for years. Underpayments involving living recipients on terminated SSI records had remained pending for an average of 18 years, while those examined involving deceased recipients had remained pending for an average of 22 years. In one case used as an example in the report, the SSA determined that a recipient had been underpaid by $1,549 but terminated the person's SSI record without releasing the money.
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