Payments to Terminated or Non-selected Representative Payees
Office Affiliation: The Office of Audit
Audit Report Number: A-09-13-23071
Some individuals cannot manage or direct the management of their benefits because of their youth or mental and/or physical impairments. Congress granted SSA the authority to appoint representative payees to receive and manage beneficiaries’ payments. SSA selects representative payees for Title II and XVI beneficiaries when representative payments would serve the individual’s interest.
SSA’s Representative Payee System (RPS) is a nation-wide database of pending, selected, non-selected, and terminated representative payees. SSA uses RPS to take and process representative applications. When SSA selects a representative payee in RPS, it should automatically update the Master Beneficiary (MBR) and Supplemental Security Records (SSR) with information about the representative payee. If the representative payee information in RPS does not agree with the MBR/SSR, RPS produces an alert to resolve the discrepancy.