Finance
Social Security Administration announces new measures to deal with overpayments
The Social Security Administration is capping clawbacks to 10% of benefits checks instead of 100%. (iStock)
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is capping clawbacks of benefit overpayments at 10% of benefits checks instead of 100% after being criticized for draconian repayment plans that left some beneficiaries destitute.
Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement that the agency would cease “the heavy-handed practice of intercepting 100% of an overpaid beneficiary’s monthly Social Security benefit” if they failed to respond to a demand for repayment. Additionally, the Social Security Administration will extend repayment plans to 60 months, up from its limit of 36 months, giving recipients an additional two years to repay the money.
The changes come after reports at the end of 2023 indicated that some Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients had seen their benefits suspended or were assessed overpayments due to COVID-19 stimulus checks, worth up to $3,200 per individual or $6,400 per married couple. However, these payments, made between April 2020 and July 2021, were supposed to be independent of Social Security benefits.
“For 88 years, the hard-working employees of the Social Security Administration have strived to pay the right amount, to the right person, at the right time,” O’Malley said. “And the agency has done this with a high degree of accuracy over a massive scale of beneficiaries. But despite our best efforts, we sometimes get it wrong and pay beneficiaries more than they are due, creating an overpayment.
“When that happens, Congress requires that we make every effort to recover those overpaid benefits,” O’Malley continued. “But doing so without regard to the larger purpose of the program can result in grave injustices to individuals, as we see from the stories of people losing their homes or being put in dire financial straits when they suddenly see their benefits cut off to recover a decades-old overpayment, or disability beneficiaries attempting to work and finding their efforts rewarded with large overpayments. Innocent people can be badly hurt. And these injustices shock our shared sense of equity and good conscience as Americans.”
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Overpayments overhaul includes other changes
The SSA also plans to reframe its guidance and procedures so that the burden of proof shifts away from the claimant in determining whether there is evidence that the claimant was at fault in causing the overpayment.
The agency also wants to make it easier for people to request a repayment waiver in case they believe they weren’t at fault or are unable to pay. To qualify, Social Security beneficiaries would only need to provide a verbal summary of their income, resources and expenses, and recipients of the means-tested SSI program would not need to provide even this summary.
The changes are part of the overhaul the SSA announced last year after coming under congressional scrutiny over the amount of overpayments it made. The SSA pays $1.4 trillion in benefits to more than 71 million people annually and gets it right in most instances. However, in 0.5% of cases, beneficiaries may have received overpayments of Social Security benefits. That number rises to 8% for overpayments of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. The agency is required by law to adjust benefits or recover debts.
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Keep more of your benefits in these states
More Social Security recipients may owe taxes on their benefits for the first time this tax season, according to the Senior Citizens League (TSCL).
In fact, 23% of survey participants who received Social Security for three years or more said they paid tax for the first time during the 2023 tax season. This percentage will likely increase this tax season because of the 8.7% COLA increase in 2023.
Social Security benefits are taxed when incomes exceed $25,000. Since the tax became effective in 1984, this fixed threshold has never been adjusted for inflation. Up to 85% of Social Security benefits can be taxable when income exceeds certain thresholds.
However, Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming have no income tax, which means that Social Security retirement benefits aren’t taxed at the state level, according to a recent AARP report.
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Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has invested heavily in its fast-growing international business as growth slows for its China-focused Taobao and Tmall business.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s international arm on Wednesday launched an updated version of its artificial intelligence-powered translation tool that, it says, is better than products offered by Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
That’s based on an assessment of Alibaba International’s new model, Marco MT, by translation benchmark framework Flores, the Chinese company said.
Alibaba’s fast-growing international unit released the AI translation product as an update to one unveiled about a year ago, which it says already has 500,000 merchant users. Sellers based in one country can use the translation tool to create product pages in the language of the target market.
The new version is based only on large language models, allowing it to draw on contextual clues such as culture or industry-specific terms, Kaifu Zhang, vice president of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group and head of the business’ artificial intelligence initiative, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“The idea is that we want this AI tool to help the bottom line of the merchants, because if the merchants are doing well, the platform will be doing well,” he said.
Large language models power artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can also translate text. The models, trained on massive amounts of data, can generate humanlike responses to user prompts.
Alibaba’s translation tool is based on its own model called Qwen. The product supports 15 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Zhang said he expects “substantial demand” for the tool from Europe and the Americas. He also expects emerging markets to be a significant area of use.
When users of Alibaba.com — a site for suppliers to sell to businesses — are categorized by country, developing countries account for about half of the top 20 active AI tool users, Zhang said.
Chinese companies have increasingly looked abroad for growth opportunities, especially e-commerce merchants. PDD Holdings‘ Temu, fast fashion seller Shein and ByteDance’s TikTok are among the recent global market entrants. Many China-based merchants also sell on Amazon.com.
Contextual clues
Since Alibaba launched the first version of its AI translation tool last fall, the company said merchants have used it for more than 100 million product listings. Similar to other AI-based services, the basic pricing charges merchants by the amount of translated text.
Zhang declined to share how much the updated version would cost. He said it was included in some service bundles for merchants wanting simple exposure to overseas users.
His thinking is that contextual translation makes it much more likely that consumers decide to buy. He shared an example in which a colloquial Chinese description for a slipper would have turned off English-speaking consumers if it was only translated literally, without getting at the implied meaning.
“The updated translation engine is going to make Double 11 a better experience for consumers because of more authentic expression,” Zhang said, in reference to the Alibaba-led shopping festival that centers on Nov. 11 each year.
Alibaba’s international business includes platforms such as AliExpress and Lazada, which primarily targets Southeast Asia. The international unit reported sales growth of 32% to $4.03 billion in the quarter ended June from a year ago.
That’s in contrast to a 1% year-on-year drop in sales to $15.6 billion for Alibaba’s main Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business, which has focused on China.
The Taobao app is also popular with consumers in Singapore. In September, the app launched an AI-powered English version for users in the country.
Nomura analysts expect that Alibaba’s international revenue slowed slightly to 29% year-on-year growth in the quarter ended September, while operating losses narrowed, according to an Oct. 10 report. Alibaba has yet to announce when it will release quarterly earnings.
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