Nearly all the people collecting Social Security Disability payments are indeed disabled. The actual number of malingerers in the system is under 1%. The Social Security Administration's internal auditors and external auditors continually find that there is far LESS abuse in the system than people imagine. Fraudulently collecting SSI disability is an area with the least amount of abuse, but the Right claims there is a great deal of abuse, without any evidence proving that. That’s why the Trump budget proposes to reduce SSI disability payments.
In some counties in Appalachia in WV and KY, young men and women graduating high school do not go to work, but begin their working life collecting SSI. Because of malnutrition and poor health care growing up, they are indeed disabled. Repeated reviews of their claims proves that out.
The most common SS abuse is adult children using direct deposit funds from SS after the parent has died. When the SSA cross checks deaths reported to medicare with direct deposit SS payments, the adult children are legally bound to return the funds received after the parent has died to the SSA. Adult men named the same as their deceased dad are sometimes able to get funds from SSA for years before being discovered, but most of them are found out.
The dollar value of fraud by employers against employees is far greater than the total dollar value of ALL social security fraud. Most state labor departments do NOTHING to protect employees from wage theft, unpaid overtime, and unpaid payroll taxes. Also, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly reduced federal government funds used to enforce laws protecting workers and their pay. The dollar value of unpaid work and unpaid payroll taxes far exceeds the dollar value of SS disability fraud.
There is NOT a great deal of disability fraud, but many more people are applying for SSI disability compared to the 1960's and 1970's. The portion of the population disabled then was higher than it is now, but fewer people applied for benefits. People were ashamed then to to be surviving via SSI disability, but they are not ashamed now because there are far fewer jobs that can be done by partially or fully disabled people now than in the past.
SSI became law under LBJ and became better funded under Nixon. The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Nation have all published extensive articles about SSI disability in the past five years that ALL concluded that SSI disability fraud was NOT as high as claimed by the Right.
The Right continues to assert there is a great deal of SSI and SSID fraud, without doing any field work to prove their case. Right wing think tanks continually manipulate census data, labor department data, and SSA data to claim the Poor and SS recipients, of all sorts, are much, much better off than they are. For example, the Cato Institute study: The Work versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013 asserted that a divorced mom raising two kids on her own who availed herself of all potential benefits would have a higher standard of living than a single mom working 40 hours a week at minimum wage. Cato’s study was cited when Republicans reduced SNAP twice in the past four years.
Cato did no fieldwork. Cato said over a 100,000 households could be living off federal and state benefits that combined to provide a living standard in excess of the $15,000 a mom could make working full time at minimum wage. Did Cato find even ONE household doing that? No. Cato did not look for any evidence. Cato did some fancy spreadsheets. Still, SNAP was reduced.
Now, to deal with an immaterial problem — social security disability fraud — the Trump budget proposes to reduce both SSI and SSI disability payments. Trump wants us to give LESS to the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the mentally retarded who collect SSI and less to the mentally ill and physically injured and ill who collect SSI disability. STOP HIM.