Under the SSI program, SSA pays monthly benefits to individuals who have limited assets and income and are aged, blind, or disabled. These benefits are funded by general tax revenues and based on financial need. SSA has estimated that, during fiscal year 2002, it will make SSI benefits payments totaling approximately $31.5 billion to about 6.4 million individuals. Since 1997, we have designated SSI a high-risk program because of its susceptibility to fraud, waste, and abuse and SSA’s insufficient management oversight. Long-standing concerns regarding program abuses and mismanagement, increasing overpayments, and the inability to recover outstanding SSI debt have led to congressional criticism of SSA’s ability to effectively manage and ensure the program’s integrity. In addition to SSI, SSA administers the OASI and DI programs—together commonly known as Social Security. These are entitlement programs funded from trust funds supported by taxes that workers pay on their wages. OASI provides monthly cash retirement to workers and their dependents or, when workers die, benefits to their survivors. The DI program provides monthly cash benefits to workers and their dependents when workers are disabled. In fiscal year 2002, the OASI and DI programs collectively are expected to pay approximately $447 billion in benefits to about 46 million eligible workers, dependents, and survivors. In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) prohibited fugitive felons from collecting SSI benefits. Specifically, under the law, an individual is ineligible to receive SSI payments during any month in which he or she is fleeing to avoid prosecution for a crime that is a felony under the laws of the place from which the person flees, fleeing to avoid custody or confinement after conviction for a crime that is a felony under the laws of the place from which the person flees, or violating a condition of probation or parole imposed under federal or state law. PRWORA provides SSA with the authority to suspend SSI payments to fugitive felons and parole and probation violators and to provide information to law enforcement agencies to aid in locating and apprehending these individuals. The act does not provide similar authority for OASI and DI benefits payments. In response to PRWORA, SSA established the fugitive felon program and entered into a partnership with its Office of Inspector General (OIG). SSA’s OIG, with its 63 field divisions and offices, has both program integrity and law enforcement functions and is the primary interface between SSA and law enforcement entities. It can investigate and make arrests for program fraud in collaboration with other law enforcement agencies pursuing SSI recipients engaging in criminal activities. Beyond OIG, numerous other offices also assist in implementing the program. As shown in figure 1, these include SSA’s offices of operations, disability and income security programs, and systems; its regional and field offices; and the FBI’s Information Technology Center in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Congress does not appropriate funds to administer the fugitive felon program. Rather, according to SSA officials, each participating SSA office (for example, the office of operations and OIG) and the FBI Information Technology Center use existing funding to support the program. Under the fugitive felon program, SSA relies on warrant information from available federal and state sources to identify ineligible SSI recipients on its rolls. SSA receives federal and state warrant information from several sources, including (1) the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC); (2) state and local law enforcement agencies; and (3) the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS). SSA receives warrant information from the FBI and USMS under memorandums of understanding and from certain state and local law enforcement agencies under matching agreements that establish conditions for SSA’s use of the warrant information in its matching operations. According to SSA, in calendar year 2001, it received approximately 27 million warrant records from these federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Of these, about 2 million records were eligible to be matched against SSI benefits files. Appendix II provides a detailed description of the fugitive felon data-matching process. OIG reports that, since 1996, the fugitive felon program data matching operations (manual and automated) have helped identify about 45,000 fugitives who were paid approximately $82 million in SSI benefits; of these fugitives, approximately 5,000 were subsequently apprehended. Appendix III presents selected cases in which fugitives were apprehended and SSI benefits were suspended as a result of the fugitive felon program. In administering the fugitive felon program, SSA faces several technological and other barriers that create inefficiencies in its processing of fugitive warrant information to identify ineligible SSI recipients. These barriers include a complex, multistep process to obtain and act on fugitive warrant information and a heavily manual approach to accomplishing critical program tasks, such as exchanging and verifying warrant information. In addition, where information systems are used to support the program, many of them are not interoperable or capable of exchanging data electronically. Consequently, key portions of the data-matching process are complicated and time-consuming. Contributing to this situation is that SSA has not designated a single, central point of management accountability to direct the fugitive felon program’s operations. The steps in administering the fugitive felon program—from the point that SSA receives the fugitive warrant information through the suspension of SSI benefits—are complicated and include many back-and-forth exchanges of warrant information among the participating entities. At the time of our review, each of the organizations participating in the program had responsibility for distinct segments of the tasks involved in processing fugitive warrant information received from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. However, there was no single entity within SSA that was able to provide a full explanation of the complete chain of activities comprising the data sharing and matching process; as a result, we mapped the process ourselves. We have depicted this overall process in figure 2. As figure 2 illustrates, SSA receives warrant records (usually on a monthly basis) from the FBI’s national repository—NCIC—and from USMS and state and local law enforcement agencies. Using its Enumeration Verification System, SSA matches the warrant records against its master files of Social Security number holders and applications to verify identity information, such as the name, date of birth, and Social Security number of the individual for whom the warrant was issued. Of those records for which identities can be verified, OIG screens the data to eliminate misdemeanors. Then, a second match is conducted against files maintained in SSA’s supplemental security record to determine which of the fugitives are receiving SSI benefits. The results of the second match (addresses of the fugitive benefits recipients) are forwarded to OIG for further processing. OIG and its field offices work with the FBI’s Information Technology Center (ITC) to verify that the felony, probation, or parole violation warrants are active and that the appropriate individuals have been identified. Once verifications are made, ITC provides address information about each SSI recipient (called “leads”) to the appropriate federal, state, or local law enforcement agency so that it can locate and apprehend the individual. After action by the law enforcement agency, OIG refers its findings to the appropriate SSA field offices, which initiate suspension of SSI benefits. In this process, SSA relies on its mainframe computers and systems to match the fugitive warrant information that it receives against the master files of Social Security number holders and applications and the supplemental security record. Most other steps, including sharing the warrant information used in the matching process, are performed manually. For example, SSA does not have a telecommunications capability that would allow it to accept warrant information on line. As a result, the FBI, USMS, and state and local law enforcement agencies must download warrant information from their respective databases and information systems onto various electronic media (such as cartridges, tapes, and CD- ROMS) and send this information to SSA via the U.S. mail or FedEx. Depending on the type of media used, two separate SSA offices—the Office of Central Operations and the Office of Telecommunications and Systems Operations—receive, log, and upload the information onto SSA’s mainframe computer to begin the matching process. Beyond manually sharing warrant information, many of the steps in verifying and referring information contained in the matched records also are performed manually. For example, to accurately identify and locate fugitives, SSA’s field offices, OIG, and the FBI’s ITC exchange numerous forms with law enforcement agencies. However, none of these forms are automated, requiring SSA and ITC staff to manually prepare and fax or mail them to the appropriate entities. In addition, both OIG’s and ITC’s program activities are supported by distinct systems that are not interoperable or compatible, thus further preventing the efficient exchange of information. Specifically, OIG’s allegation and case investigative system and ITC’s automated case support system are used, respectively, to assign case and allegation numbers to matched records and to verify duplicate instances of matched data. However, these systems cannot electronically share the matched records on which both offices must act. Rather, the OIG must download files containing matched records and mail them to ITC. Further, OIG’s system uses Microsoft Word and ITC’s system uses Corel WordPerfect; thus, when ITC receives the files, it must convert them to a usable format to be able to process the warrant information. The various manual interventions in processing fugitive warrants all contribute to a time-consuming operation that is less than optimally efficient.