Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.</p><p>The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a "degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims. </p><p>Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all. </p><p>“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said. </p><p>The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend."</p><p><a href="https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2025/05/doge-went-looking-phone-fraud-ssa-and-found-almost-none/405346/?oref=ng-homepage-river" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nextgov.com/digital-government</span><span class="invisible">/2025/05/doge-went-looking-phone-fraud-ssa-and-found-almost-none/405346/?oref=ng-homepage-river</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DOGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DOGE</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Musk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Musk</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SSA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SSA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialSecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialSecurity</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Austerity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Austerity</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antifraud" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Antifraud</span></a></p>