When someone you care for needs help with their benefits, you need to be named by SSA as their representative payee. You can become a payee for a partner, spouse, child, parent, or close friend, and the only power you have is to help this person administer their Social Security Benefits. This means the money is sent to you, but you are merely an administrator for it. You spend it on behalf of the recipient, and it must be used for their care and upkeep. Everyone with a Social Security Number can pick a designated representative payee by logging on to their Social Security Account at ssa.gov and naming them. This might ease the process should something go wrong that prevents you from administrating your own benefits, but the person you name will still have to go through the verification steps that follow.
The payee appointment process starts with an interview (in-person or over the phone, depending on the current pandemic threat level) with the SSA itself. Your local office should be able to help you directly. At the appointment, they ask you questions about your eligibility, relationship with the beneficiary, and try to tease out if you are taking advantage of the person you want to represent. Be honest, and if it comes out during the interview that you may not be the best person to take care of them, you and the SSA rep will know. The SSA rep will ask for documentation (sent via fax or mail, blech) of why this person needs a payee due to their disability or incapacitation. Afterwards, the rep may solicit more documentation from doctors or care facility staff about your relationship with the person receiving benefits. They will ensure this person is being taken care of now, and that you, as the payee, are working with skilled providers in the patient’s best interest. The collection/submittal period for this documentation has a strict deadline of 30 days. You will need to start all over again with another interview if something goes awry. In my case, the payee appointment coincided with the beginning of the pandemic. Doctors were slow to respond, and the first attempt expired with no decision, so stay on top of it! If you have any doubts, reach out to the SSA rep that interviewed you.
After a nerve-wracking 30 days, you should receive paperwork in the mail from the SSA that you have been appointed as as representative payee. It should also explain how much the benefits are, how they will be paid, and where they will be sent. The booklet that comes with this details your responsibilities, so read it, memorize it, and prepare to follow its guidance. It is also possible that you will receive a letter after appointment but before the payment has been sorted out. It may say something panic-inducing like, "We have chosen you to be NNN's representative payee. However, we cannot pay you benefits at this time." After calling around and finding some threads after the fact, this letter is nothing to panic about. It is automatically generated by the system, and it indicates that you, personally, are not receiving benefits, even if your payee will be. This thread helped a lot to assuage my fears. The benefit information pertaining to the person for which you are responsible will be in the letter about your appointment as a payee.
If your are the payee for a relative or friend (not a spouse, child, or institutional relation), the next step is to create a separate bank account for the payee. This will make managing the flow of money as easy as possible without mingling your funds with theirs. It also gives you is an account for direct deposit so you don’t need to handle paper checks.. Talk to your bank or credit union. Most will understand what you mean when you say you want to open up a "payee account", and the guidebook on payees includes specific language for titling the account. Talk with your banker to ensure you have chosen an account type with no fees. Having direct deposit means you can usually get one for free, so shop around, and don’t be afraid to take your business elsewhere if the big banks want to charge you a monthly fee. I was able to set up an account and direct deposit the same day. You will need to call the SSA National Line at (800)772-1213 once you have the routing and account numbers. Once this is set up, another letter with a panic-inducing first sentence may arrive. It may say, "We cannot pay you NNN's regular monthly benefit at this time..." followed by the fact that they are instead sending them to a financial institution. This is just to warn you that you will no longer be getting paper checks. At this point, the benefits should be flowing securely and with minimal overhead for you.
Your main paperwork duty is the annual Representative Payee Report detailing that funds were spent in the interests of the person receiving the benefits. Start keeping receipts in a central place, write expenses down in a log book, make copies, and familiarize yourself with the forms ahead of time. You don't want to panic at the last minute and have to assemble documentation from scraps or jeopardize your appointment as payee. While I haven't had to do the yearly accounting just yet, I have had to do similar steps for trustee paperwork. I'll be sure to update this once I have gone through the process.
Having the payee designation allows me a lot more peace of mind when interacting with SSA on my grandfather's behalf. It's parallel to a Power of Attorney process, and its procedures are a little arcane. I hope this brought you some clarity when doing it for your own loved ones.
