Social Security Fairness Act Calls for 2024 Back Payments

The GPO applies to those eligible for spousal or survivors' benefits, while the WEP applies to those eligible for their own Social Security benefits. Congress enacted legislation reducing Social Security benefits through GPO and WEP in 1977 and 1983, respectively.

Critics of the rules have said that the WEP and GPO unfairly punish public-sector workers and first responders, among other constituencies.

As ThinkAdvisor has reported, the provisions were established decades ago to address flaws in Social Security's benefit formula that could result in certain government workers receiving higher Social Security benefits as if they were longtime low-wage earners — despite having had substantial work earnings and being paid a commensurate government pension benefit.

At the time, the establishment of these policies was seen as a matter of necessity and fairness, because people with ostensibly similar earnings histories could see substantially different outcomes in the benefit filing process depending on how their earnings history was balanced across covered and non-covered work.

However, data limitations at the time meant Congress enacted flawed formulas, with the WEP tending to overcorrect benefit calculations in a way that more often harms lower income families and the GPO overcorrecting in a way that can harm higher earners.

Another issue that has emerged in the decades since is that the complexity of the WEP and GPO policies leads the Social Security Administration to make a small but not insignificant number of erroneous payments to beneficiaries, which can then potentially be clawed back. This is one reason why some lawmakers want to limit the clawback period to three years.

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