Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of H.R. 4547, the Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018, a bipartisan bill developed by House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson and Ranking Member John Larson. This bill updates the representative payee program by strengthening oversight and beneficiary protections, while improving payee selection and quality. As a true testament to Chairman Johnson and Ranking Member Larson's bipartisan work, the bill passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate unanimously just before Congress adjourned in March.

Social Security's Representative Payment program provides financial management for the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income, SSI, payments of beneficiaries who are incapable of managing their Social Security or SSI payment. Today almost 6 million representative payees manage benefits on behalf of about 8 million Social Security beneficiaries and SSI recipients. Most often, the representative payee is a family member, like a spouse or a parent. When friends or family are not available to serve as payees, Social Security can use qualified organizations to be representative payees.

Most payees perform their duties responsibly and with care. Some do not, and stakeholders in this process have raised concerns. The Social Security Advisory Board, the National Academy of Sciences, the Government Accountability Office, and Social Security's inspector general have uncovered problems with current policy and ideas for improvement. It has been almost 15 years since the last significant change to the law in this area, and this bill makes several needed policy changes and common sense improvements.

The bill strengthens oversight of representative payees by requiring additional types of reviews of payee performance and draws on the expertise of the protection and advocacy system of each state to conduct the reviews. The bill reduces the burden on families by eliminating the requirement to file the annual accounting form for representative payees who are parents or spouses and are living with the beneficiary. The bill requires data exchanges between SSA and State foster care agencies to identify when there is a change in status of a beneficiary in foster care and reassess whether the payee is appropriate. The bill allows new beneficiaries to make an advance payee designation. Finally, the bill codifies current policy that bars felons from serving as a payee and requires SSA to recheck all existing payees.

In 2016, my office was contacted by Lexie Gruber, a former foster youth from Connecticut. Lexie's story brought a human face to this issue and showed where the system had gone wrong. This young woman had recently aged out of foster care, graduated college at the top of her class, and moved to Washington, DC, for a new job, a success story that is unfortunately all too rare for children who have grown up in foster care. Lexie was working hard, but still struggled to afford living expenses in an expensive city while trying to work hard to save for law school. That was before the IRS notified her that the value of outstanding SSI overpayments were going to be withheld from her tax returns. This was outstanding debt she didn't know she had for benefits she never even got. To me, this is the definition of unjust. She had to contact Congress for help and since then has worked tirelessly to help ensure that other former foster youth aren't forced through her experience. This bill fixes this flaw in the system to ensure that youth aging out of care, struggling to make it on their own, aren't held liable for the mistakes of or misinformation from foster care agencies.

I thank Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Larson, and their staff for putting together this bipartisan bill. It is another example of what can be accomplished when working together.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source