Jason Smith: “The windfall elimination provision, or WEP as it is more commonly known, was put in place more than four decades ago to…”

“The windfall elimination provision, or WEP as it is more commonly known, was put in place more than four decades ago to prevent workers with earnings that were exempt from Social Security payroll taxes from getting more generous treatment from Social Security than workers who spent their whole careers contributing to Social Security. Unfortunately, WEP still results in overly generous payments for some while unfairly penalizing others. H.R. 5342, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, provides current beneficiaries affected by the WEP with an additional $100 per month and replaces the current-law WEP for future beneficiaries with a new formula that bases benefits on a worker's total career earnings. This past year, the Ways and Means Committee has held more hearings on WEP than in any other Congress in the past 20 years and identified that the WEP formula could be replaced with a formula that provides all beneficiaries with a fair benefit based on their actual earnings using data that wasn't available when the WEP was put in place 40 years ago. {time} 1630 The bill before us today, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, replaces the WEP with a new formula based on this now-available earnings data to more accurately adjust benefits.…”