Merry Christmas

 

Oopsie

      From CBS News:

Highly sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and bank account information, was mailed out to the wrong recipients in the Delaware Valley. The mix-up created confusion and concern that the mistake could have led to identity theft.

The Maggitti family from Broomall said they got paperwork back after filling out an online application for Social Security benefits for 18-year-old Anthony Maggitti Jr., but there was one glaring problem.

"I started reading it and realized this didn't make sense. This doesn't seem to be his information," Colleen Maggitti said. "So I saw that on the top it was supposed to go to a person named Holly, who does live in this area, but that was all of her information." …

CBS News Philadelphia contacted the Social Security Administration, which said in a statement, "Important to note that this mistake was an isolated incident and the result of human error. The incident is being investigated."

While the administration wouldn't say how many people were affected, they said it was a limited number and corrective actions were being taken. …

     By the way, I wouldn’t post this if it only involved a couple of people but it sounds like there’s more involved.  Isolated but not that isolated.

     Also, by the way, many years ago I discovered a much larger privacy problem at Social Security. When Social Security introduced an electronic data system that most Social Security attorneys call ERE it prepared a demo that it handed out on a CD showing how the system worked. They used real claimants’ records but tried to redact them. Unfortunately, they did a poor job of redaction. PII was openly visible in several places. I happened to be one of the first people to receive the CD. I imagine at least a few dozen other people received the CD at about the same time. I was the one who noticed the problem and notified the agency. My understanding was that they were abashed. I know they tried to get all the CDs back.

Merry Christmas

 

Trump Administration Does Something Sort Of Normal

      From Newsweek:

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent letters to 39 governors on Thursday calling for an end to the diversion of foster youths’ earned Social Security survivor benefits.  

The ACF said in a press release that state welfare agencies often intercept federal benefits, such as Social Security survivor benefits earned through a deceased parent’s lifetime contributions, that are intended for a child in foster care. The welfare agencies reimburse their own costs using these funds. 

The ACF sent letters to governors who allow this practice and said it plans to work with states to end it.  …

Merry Christmas

 

And We're Back To This

      The New York Post is running an article in which Senator Joni Ernst criticizes Social Security for making payments to dead people. The tone of the article suggests there's some awful scandal going on. However, it doesn't give the entire context showing that payments to dead people are a tiny portion of benefits paid and that Social Security makes extensive efforts to prevent the overpayments. Social Security's efforts to identify dead beneficiaries are so successful that the agency's Death Master File is widely used in the financial industry to prevent fraud. They use it because they can't do better. Most notably the article includes no suggestion on how the agency could do a better job of identifying dead people.

    I sometimes think that if Republican leaders had their way the Social Security Administration would spend as much money trying to find fraud as it does to make benefit payments. Why are they so obsessed with fraud? Because they hate the very existence of Social Security and want proof that it's fatally flawed.

Merry Christmas

 

Afraid Of Voters

      From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):

Friday, December 12 is the deadline for public comments on a policy the Trump Administration secretly adopted in May, giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to personal data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) on nearly every U.S. resident. DHS has been encouraging states to use this data to reverify the citizenship of voters, and DHS says state voting officials have already queried these data tens of millions of times. A court order recently forced the Administration to disclose the arrangement and allow public input.

The Administration policy raises significant legal, privacy, and other concerns. One of the most serious is that Social Security data don’t have complete or up-to-date citizenship information, so using them to verify citizenship will almost inevitably lead to errors — potentially disenfranchising U.S. citizen voters ahead of the midterm elections. …

For people not receiving Social Security benefits, SSA has long stated that its citizenship data are incomplete, can be outdated, and “do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship.” While SSA data can be helpful in proving that someone is a citizen — for example, to meet Medicaid’s citizenship requirements — the data have several well-known shortcomings in proving that someone isn’t a citizen. …