After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.

The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a "degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims.

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all.

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said.

The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.

The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the antifraud claims, a move that “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” as the document noted.

When SSA put the policy in place in early April, the agency said it would require people deemed suspicious to go in-person to an office to prove their identity.

Initially, the anti-fraud algorithm was being run against all phone claims, but SSA...

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