(a) Your representative payee must account for the use of your benefits. We require written reports from your representative payee at least once a year.

(b) Your representative payee is exempt from the accounting requirement when your representative payee is the spouse of an individual eligible for SVB payments.

(c) We may verify how your representative payee used your benefits. Your representative payee should keep records of how benefits were used in order to provide accounting reports and must make those records available upon our request. If your representative payee fails to provide an annual accounting of benefits or other required report, we may require your payee to appear in person at the local Social Security field office or a United States Government facility that we designate serving the area in which you reside. The decision to have your representative payee receive your benefits in person may be based on a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons may include the payee's history of past performance or our past difficulty in contacting the payee. We may ask your representative payee to give us the following information:

(1) Where you lived during the accounting period;

(2) Who made the decisions on how your benefits were spent or saved;

(3) How your benefit payments were used; and

(4) How much of your benefit payments were saved and how the savings were invested.