Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 1

(released February 2024)
by Michael Compson

The Social Security Administration's Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics (ORES) produces annual statistical publications that estimate the employment and earnings of U.S. workers. This article evaluates a new methodology developed by ORES to assign a state and county of residence code and identify the date of birth and sex of nearly all workers, rather than a 1-percent sample of workers, for whom tax records provide earnings data for a given year. The evaluation compares the estimates generated by the current methodology with those of the new methodology using microdata for tax year 2017. The results align with preevaluation expectations and highlight the importance of using a much larger sample of workers, which the new process enables, to generate the annual employment and earnings estimates.

by Denise Hoffman, Monica Farid, John T. Jones, Serge Lukashanets, and Michael T. Anderson

In this article, the authors track the experiences of working Disability Insurance beneficiaries who received benefit overpayments because of work during their first 10 years after award. They describe the antecedents to overpayments and compare the likelihoods of continued benefit receipt for working beneficiaries who did and did not receive overpayments.