Kafkaesque Nightmare: Thousands of SSI Recipients Accused of Owning Property That Isn’t Theirs

In March 2018, the Social Security Administration (SSA) had a nasty surprise for Teresa Sims, a woman with disabilities who lives in a group home in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.  The agency informed her by letter that she would no longer be receiving the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks she’d been living on since she was a child because she had failed to disclose that she owned three pieces of real estate in a county six hours north of her home. Local SSA officials wouldn’t believe her when she told them that she had never been to the county, let alone owned property there.  

The same has happened to thousands of other SSI recipients -- people with disabilities or the elderly living on basic assistance income, according to a joint report by the National Consumer Law Center and Justice in Aging. The problem started in 2018 when the SSA, in an effort to find government assistance beneficiaries owning unreported property that could disqualify them from receiving benefits, began cross-checking lists of property owners on a LexisNexis data set called Accurint for Government. Letters started turning up in the mail informing people that their benefits had been cancelled, and in some cases even demanding repayment. Often the letters did not even identify the properties allegedly belonging to the recipients, making it even more difficult for the falsely accused to deny the claims and convince local SSA officials that they owned no property.

It should be of little surprise that the SSA’s initiative netted innocent people, notes the new report, “Mismatched and Mistaken: How the Use of an Inaccurate Private Database Results in SSI Recipients Unjustly Losing Benefits.”  Accurint for Government's database is “riddled with errors,” the report states. Accurint drew up its list of alleged property owners by simply plugging first and last names into the LexisNexis database, without even checking to see if middle initials or Social Security numbers matched those of assistance recipients.

Such laxity would never have passed muster with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA). So to get around this, LexisNexis inserted a disclaimer at the bottom of its website, which reads: “Accurint for Government is not a consumer report (as defined in the Fair Credit Reporting Act) and may not be used for any purpose permitted by the FCRA.” For its part, the SSA is using the disclaimer to strip benefits recipients of their rights; the FCRA would have otherwise entitled the SSI recipients to be notified before action is taken, and given them the right to have inaccurate information investigated and corrected, the report points out.

The SSA claims that it did not act on the LexisNexis data alone, but rather used it as a starting point for further investigation to determine whether recipients did own property. But advocates around the country challenge this assertion, pointing to numerous cases like that of Ms. Sims where action was taken without further investigation, the report says.

Ms. Sims went without any income for six months.  It took the efforts of a dogged legal services attorney and many letters, meetings and appeals before her benefits were reinstated.  The SSA finally acknowledged that the real estate in question was owned by Teresa A. Sims and her husband Harold Sims, not by SSI recipient Teresa Sims, who has no middle initial.

Among several recommendations to prevent such future calamities, the National Consumer Law Center and Justice in Aging together ask that LexisNexis and SSA acknowledge that Accurint for Government is a consumer report, and they call on both to abide by FRCA standards. The report also calls for the SSA to implement an appeals process that allows benefits recipients to challenge claims against them before any action is taken.

To read the full report, click here.