OAN Staff James Meyers
10:40 AM – Saturday, March 8, 2025
The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it was putting a plan back in place to recover 100% of overpayments to beneficiaries.
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In a statement, the SSA said Friday evening that it will increase the default overpayment withholding rate for Social Security recipients to 100% of a person’s monthly benefit, the same exact level that it had in place before last year’s reform. By law, the agency has to peel back on the overpaid benefits.
This comes after the agency abandoned the policy last year after calls over cases in which the plan led Americans to receive shocking bills amounting to thousands of dollars.
Due to the backlash over the policy, the agency had set a pause with the withholding rate for someone who had been overpaid at 10% of the person’s monthly benefit.
On Friday, the SSA said it will start claiming 100% of benefit checks to cover new cases of overpayments, but the withholding rate for people with overpayments before March 27th will remain at 10% as well as the rate for overpayments for Supplemental Security Income, which is a program for low-income seniors and disabled Americans.
“People who are overpaid after March 27 will automatically be placed in full recovery at a rate of 100% of the Social Security payment,” the agency said.
The 100% clawback policy had sparked an outcry after several instances happened in which beneficiaries were hit with surprise bills that demanded repayment within 30 days. In some cases, the bills were for tens of thousands of dollars. If beneficiaries were unable to immediately pay the bill, the agency could dock their entire monthly Social Security payment, leaving some people financially setback.
In most cases, the overpayments were blamed on the SSA.
According to a 2022 report by the agency’s inspector general, close to 73,000 overpayments that happened during that time were due to a lack of “effective controls over benefit-computation accuracy.”
In the agency’s new statement, SSA Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek said it is the agency’s “duty to revise the overpayment repayment policy back to full withholding.”
He added, “We have the significant responsibility to be good stewards of the trust funds for the American people.”
According to the SSA, the changed back rate of 100% from its current 10% will increase the amount of recovered funds by $7 billion over the next decade.
Each year the agency pays close to $1.6 trillion in benefits each year.
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