Has the Social Security Administration ever published audited counts of benefit terminations by citizenship or immigration status?
Executive summary
No. There is no evidence in the reporting reviewed that the Social Security Administration (SSA) has published an audited, agency-verified count of benefit terminations broken down by citizenship or immigration status; SSA’s own records are incomplete for citizenship, OIG audits concern enumeration integrity and multiple SSNs but do not provide a published audited tally of terminations by immigration status, and the Trustees’ actuarial reports model immigrant counts rather than certify terminations by status [1] [2] [3].
1. What the user is really asking and why it matters
The question seeks a formally “audited” dataset tying benefit termination events—when Social Security or related payments stop—to the recipient’s documented citizenship or immigration classification, implying an authoritative, verified public tally that could be used to prove how many noncitizens lost or were denied benefits; whether such a dataset exists matters because it would inform debates about program eligibility, fraud, and the use of administrative records for policy or electoral purposes [1] [3].
2. What SSA publishes and what it tells researchers
SSA publishes many public resources—program pages, instructions to update citizenship or immigration status, benefit rules for noncitizens, enumeration program descriptions, and actuarial analyses such as the Trustees Report—that document eligibility rules, how to change records, and population projections, but these are primarily operational guidance and fiscal projections rather than audited event-level lineups of benefit terminations by immigration status [4] [5] [6] [3].
3. Audits that do exist — and their scope
Independent audits and Office of Inspector General reports have examined SSA processes such as enumeration accuracy, multiple Social Security numbers, and the integrity of data received through programs like Enumeration at Entry, finding issues and documenting processing accuracy for SSN issuance and record integrity; for example, an SSA OIG audit addresses multiple SSNs and enumeration accuracy and explains how data are collected and verified with USCIS, but it does not publish an audited count of benefit terminations by citizenship status [2]. A 2019 OIG-style audit is cited in press analyses as explaining why SSA can rapidly enumerate noncitizens but that still addresses enumeration rather than audited termination counts [7].
4. Why SSA’s citizenship fields are unreliable for a termination tally
SSA itself and watchdogs warn that citizenship markers in SSA administrative files are incomplete and can be outdated, and past audits have found large numbers of potentially incorrect citizenship indicators—an issue flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and others—which undercuts the reliability of any ad hoc tabulation of terminations by citizenship without rigorous revalidation and audit [1]. That admission helps explain why an audited, definitive count of benefit terminations by immigration status does not appear to have been published: the underlying citizenship data were known to be imperfect [1].
5. What other published counts exist, and why they are different
There are published counts and analyses related to issuance of Social Security numbers to noncitizens (for example, EBE enumeration totals cited in media reports), and actuarial documents and Trustees Reports model immigrant populations and hypothetical fiscal impacts, but those outputs describe SSN issuance or projections of immigrant counts and fiscal effects—not audited, verified counts of benefit terminations by legal status [7] [8] [3].
6. Political stakes, misuse risks, and alternative viewpoints
Some actors have sought to use SSA administrative data to verify citizenship for purposes like voter rolls or public debate, but critics warn SSA data are incomplete and that using them for exclusionary purposes risks error or disenfranchisement—a disagreement about suitability rather than about whether an audited termination-by-status series exists [1]. Advocates for better administrative data argue for more automated matching and updating (SSA has taken steps to match naturalization data with DHS in recent years), while civil liberties groups and analysts caution against repurposing imperfect files without independent validation [1].
Conclusion
The available reporting shows SSA and external auditors have assessed enumeration and citizenship-flagging processes and that SSA publishes operational and actuarial outputs, but it does not show that SSA has ever released an audited, authoritative count of benefit terminations categorized by citizenship or immigration status; the agency’s known data gaps on citizenship and the focus of existing audits on enumeration integrity rather than termination-by-status accounting explain the absence of such a public count in the materials reviewed [2] [1] [3].