The Social Security Administration says a federal judge’s ruling last week suspending a crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants could cause a major disruption in its processing of millions of routine retirement and disability claims.
In papers filed late Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, David A. Rust, an acting Social Security deputy commissioner, said a vast bureaucratic logjam would result unless the agency was allowed this month to mail about 141,000 already-prepared letters advising employers of discrepancies between workers’ Social Security information and agency records. Government lawyers said any delay in the mailing — or any requirement that the mailing be revised — would cause “significant harm” to the agency and “interfere with its ability to carry out its core functions.” ...
In a statement, Mr. Rust said the Social Security Administration had already delayed sending the letters to employers for several months this year as officials negotiated with immigration authorities over the new rules and the Senate debated an immigration bill, which failed in June.
Although Judge Chesney did not bar the agency from sending the letters if references to the new rules were removed, Mr. Rust said it would take 30 days to fix the mailing. He said any delay past mid-September would cause a backlog that would spread into the first half of 2008, when he said the agency was expecting a “significant increase” in its workload, though he did not say why. He said the agency was facing “severe budgetary constraints” and a staffing shortage. ...
This is utter balderdash. Delaying sending out the letters does no harm to the Social Security Administration. Sending them out is going to cause a huge workload increase. I am appalled to see this sort of misrepresentation to a federal court. This is not the sort of thing that we would want to see from an "independent" Social Security Administration. This is a sign of an agency acting as if it reported directly to the White House.
3 comments:
It is not really balderdash--Delaying sending the mailings, as well as having to reword them, will cause it to run into all of the other year-end mailings that SSA makes--COLA notices, Medicare notices, award notices for people retiring at the end of the year. In addition, 2008 is the beginning of the baby-boomer retirement wave, which will result in increased workloads just as many more SSA employees are bailing out of the failing agency.
When any straw will break the camel's back, bales of straw are being dumped on SSA.
Sending out No Match letters in and of itself is not new workload for SSA. It is part of an existing, time-sensitive business process.
http://www.ssa.gov/legislation/nomatch2.htm
Note: SSA began sending no-match letters to workers in 1979 and to employers in 1994.
The application of the No Match letters to immigration purposes by including the DHS insert in the mailings is what may set off an increased workload, since more people would then "care" about receiving the letter (take it seriously and try to resolve the no match issue - thus contacting SSA field offices and customer service phone lines), as a no match then could have serious consequences for businesses and individuals.
However, not sending out the No Match letters could compound the W-2 processing data quality issues for SSA the next time around...which would start with the next wave of W-2s when SSA begins to send the processed Form W-2 data to the IRS on a weekly basis starting in January.
The letters should be sent out and if Numident records need to be corrected, they should be corrected.
The office requests a microprint of the SSN application from Boyers, PA. If we entered the info incorrectly, we fix it. If it wasn't our mistake, the person submits an SSN application.
90 days is plenty time to get an SSN record corrected.
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