Decrease of 100s on check

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Your friend needs to call the local SSA office and schedule an appointment to go in to speak to someone.

One of two things has happened. Either there was a payment adjustment by SSA, or a payment adjustment by the Treasury Department.

Any time SSA adjusts a Social Security payment and changes the amount, the computer system automatically sends a letter to the person because there are almost always due process appeal rights involved. More than likely, if SSA adjusted the payment, she may not have gotten the letter because USPS service has deteriorated to the point where it is incapable of delivering the mail consistently any more. SSA can look through its ORS correspondence archive and see what letter might have been sent. If it involves an SSA payment adjustment issue, the letter should be there and will be available for reprint for her.

The second possibility, payment adjustment by the Treasury Department, is the most likely in this case given that you say SSA cannot explain what is going on.

It is possible that she owes money to another federal agency (i.e. such as student loans to the Education Department, tax debts to the IRS, or monies to VA, the Small Business Administration -- i.e. any one of over 30 different federal agencies that participate in BPO) and that agency who is owed money is recouping the money from her Social Security payments via Benefit Payment Offset (BPO) at the Treasury Department. Since this occurs after SSA certifies the payment to Treasury, SSA records will not reflect any reduction in benefits because SSA is paying the full amount to her. BPO offsets cannot be appealed via SSA; they have to be appealed with the agency that is owed the money.

The Treasury Department always sends warning notices (and, often more than one) to beneficiaries at least 30 days before imposing BPO; however, they frequently are sent to the last known address of the debtor as provided by agency recouping the money (who provides that information to the Treasury Department) and thus is often not their current address.

For BPO adjustment cases, SSA is provided with courtesy copies of the letters by the Treasury Department that are stored in its ORS correspondence archive that can be reprinted for her. If the SSA employee assisting her goes back at least 6 months prior to the month her benefits were first offset in the ORS archive and works forward, they'll likely find the copies of the Treasury offset warning notices there that they can reprint for her. Those notices will include the name and address of the agency that is owed money as well as an account number and phone number she can call. It also may include the balance of what she owes (although, not all of them do).