• 17
  • February
    2012

Forty-four states, including New York, provide a state supplemental payment each month to the federal check received by a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipient. The great majority of those states administer that program internally.

Not so, New York, which, along with a few other states that include California and New Jersey, contracts out with the Social Security Administration (SSA) to take care of that task.

That is an inordinately expensive outlay for what is essentially a simple process, says Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and he wants to change it. To set that in motion, Cuomo has provided for an initiative in the state's 2012-13 Executive Budget that calls for taking over the state supplemental payment from the federal government.

The annual savings associated with that move will be about $90 million, says Russell Sykes, the former state deputy commissioner of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.

Sykes applauds the would-be change, calling it "a perfect example of the efficiencies that can be achieved from close scrutiny of wasteful practices."

How much of a critic Sykes has been regarding the SSA's control of the state's payment process is hardly uncertain. He calls the annual costs that SSA charges for each SSI recipient "price gouging" and states that New York can take care of check processing and issuance at a much lower cost. He estimates that the savings for each account will clock in at about 80 percent. With New York's 680,000 recipients, that explains the stated $90 million savings.

The state's Spending and Government Efficiency Commission recommends the move and endorses the governor's initiative.

Source: Syracuse, "State should take over SSI payment function" Russell Sykes, Feb. 13, 2012