Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on how the Social Security Administration (SSA) resolved problems in crediting wages to workers' social security accounts.
GAO found that: (1) as of June 1989, SSA had about 178 million wage reports worth $138.4 billion of uncredited earnings in its suspense file; (2) SSA reduced the size of the suspense file and credited more workers' wages by using independently developed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data to identify to whom the uncredited earnings belonged; (3) as of June 1989, IRS had resolved 345,950 tax year 1987 wage reports, representing $2.1 billion in wages, that SSA continued to carry as unresolved in its suspense file; (4) although not all IRS resolutions passed the SSA validation check for crediting wages to individual accounts, SSA could credit many of the accounts after additional followup; (5) SSA could directly credit about 120,000 of the IRS resolutions that matched valid SSA accounts; and (6) IRS matched the remaining unresolved 226,380 wage reports to social security (SSN) and name combinations that did not agree with the SSA official SSN and name control file.
