Comments made in recent days by President Donald Trump’s press secretary have sparked a wave of myth-busting about the amount of fraud or waste in the U.S. Social Security system, as some parties (including the billionaire Elon Musk) suggest that millions of deceased Americans continue to receive benefit payments.
It’s a worrying proposition, but government statistics and assessments from independent experts suggest otherwise.
While mistakes are made and fraud indeed occurs, the fact is that the vast majority of payments are made properly — and funds paid out in error are often identified and recouped.
“Less than 1% of Social Security payments are improper,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. “That's far less than in private sector retirement systems.”
Historically, Altman explained, the front-line workers in Social Security field offices have been at the forefront of detecting any fraudulent claims. That’s why she is so concerned to see the current administration’s push to reduce the federal government’s workforce and physical footprint, including by closing Social Security Administration offices.
“[President Trump] has directed the General Services Administration to terminate the leases on those offices, which means they will likely soon close,” Altman warned. “The number of SSA workers is also at a historic low relative to the size of the population. The best way to strengthen protections against fraud is to adequately fund SSA so it can hire sufficient staff, and to open more field offices instead of closing them.”
Where Overpayments Really Go
While Americans should have confidence in the overall accuracy of the Social Security system, it’s also important to acknowledge that errors do happen and that process improvements could be made.
According to a 2024 report from the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General, Social Security made nearly $72 billion in improper payments between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. Contrary to the social media speculation about “vampire payments,” most of the improper payments were overpayments — meaning rightful beneficiaries simply received more money than they were due.
According to the report, at the end of fiscal 2023, SSA had an uncollected overpayment balance of $23 billion. As such, the watchdog office has identified improper payments as a “major management challenge” since fiscal year 2002. Like Altman, the primary recommendation is more investment in modernizing and fully staffing the program.
"It is crucial that SSA find ways to prevent improper payments before they occur so it can reduce the administrative and productivity cost it incurs to correct improper payments and devote more resources to other priority workloads," the report concluded. "SSA also must identify and prevent improper payments through automation and data analytics, expand efforts to collect data from reliable third-party sources, and address the root causes of improper payments to prevent their occurrence. Without better access to data, increased automation, systems modernization, and policy or legislative changes, improper payments will continue to be an issue into the future."
Adding to the concern, clawing back improperly paid benefits can result in financial hardship. About a million people a year are billed by the agency for benefit overpayments, often thousands of dollars, "60 Minutes" reported in late 2023.
Are Dead People Getting Social Security Benefits?
The notion that the SSA is writing monthly checks to millions of dead people is "absurd, corrosive nonsense," the financial writer and editor James Surowiecki wrote Tuesday. He stepped through the latest government statistics to help assuage Americans’ fears about rampant fraud or abuse in the Social Security system.
As Surowiecki detailed, Social Security checks go to five groups of people: retired workers, their dependents, survivors of retired workers who have died, disabled workers, and their dependents.
“We know how many people in each of these groups get checks,” he wrote on X. “The biggest group, obviously, is retired workers — this is what we think of as classic Social Security. In Dec. 2024, 51.8 million American workers aged 62+ got SS retirement benefits. That's out of a population of more than 60 million Americans who are 62+.”
Another 2.6 million dependents of retired workers collect small Social Security benefits, while 5.8 million survivors (widows, widowers, children and dependent parents) also get them. Finally, via a separate program also administered by SSA, 7.2 million disabled workers and 1.1 million of their dependents received benefits.
“Total number of Americans who receive some Social Security benefit today is ~68.5 million,” Surowiecki concluded. “To believe that tens of millions of those benefits are going to dead people, you’d have to believe that 15-30% of all SS checks are fraudulent. More than that, you’d have to ignore math.
“As I said, there are 60+ million Americans aged 62+,” he continued. “Only 51.8 million of them are collecting retired-worker benefits. If Social Security is paying tens of millions of dead people, why is the number of old people getting SS benefits smaller than the number of old people, period?”
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