Waiver of Recovery of Certain Overpayment Debts Accruing During the COVID-19 Pandemic Period

We are issuing this interim final rule with request for comments to revise our regulations on how we waive the recovery of certain overpayment debts. We will apply this interim final rule when an affected beneficiary requests waiver of certain overpayment debts that accrued during a portion of the COVID-19 pandemic period. Under this rule, we may waive recovery of these overpayment debts using a streamlined internal process. Since the overpayment debts at issue occurred because of the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 national public health emergency, we can assume that these debts are not the fault of the affected beneficiaries due directly to our strategic decision to reprioritize workloads to stop manually processing certain actions, and it would be against equity and good conscience to collect them. In particular, qualifying overpayment debts include those incurred between March 1 to September 30, 2020 that we did not manually process as a result of our cession of certain activities, and that we identified by December 31. We expect that this interim final rule will allow us to maintain effective stewardship of the Social Security programs, while simultaneously ensuring that affected beneficiaries are not disadvantaged by our actions during this unprecedented national public health emergency.