The Social Security Administration has agreed to pay more than $500 million in back benefits to more than 80,000 recipients whose benefits were unfairly denied after they were flagged by a federal computer program designed to catch serious criminals, officials said Tuesday.
According to a preliminary agreement, approved Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, Calif., the Social Security Administration will pay recipients who have been denied benefits since Jan. 1, 2007. In addition, more than 120,000 recipients who were denied benefits before 2007 are eligible to apply for reinstatement....
"It's changing a policy which was really devastating for some of the most vulnerable people in the country," said Gerald McIntyre, an attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center, one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs.
The searches captured dozens of criminals, including some wanted for homicide. But they also ensnared countless elderly and disabled people accused of relatively minor offenses such as shoplifting or writing bad checks. In some cases, the victims simply shared a name and a birth date with an offender. Often it was difficult for these citizens to appeal their cases....
In the last few years, at least eight district court judges across the country have ruled in favor of victims in individual cases, saying that cutting off benefits based solely on the database search was illegal.
The headline at the Post calls this a "database error"! And SSA wants to characterize their illegal and unfair policy as something that just went a bit awry. The heartache that this policy has caused beneficiaries, and the nightmarish bureaucratic intransigence that both applicants and their representatives found themselves in has been government overreaching at its worst. The SSA took an official position that an affected beneficiary had no appeal rights in these situations!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very happy day, I thank the tireless advocates at the National Senior Citizens Law Center for their hard work and congratulate them on their success in this suit. I am an attorney with a Legal Services program, and I now can tell some of my clients to go get their benefits back.
The so-called "fugitive felon" cases have been a nightmare for FO's. Claimants show up in the office having already been cut off, with cryptic coding on the SSI computer record. The claimants often have no idea what the original charge was, or even where it occurred. and the FO personnel have no access to the records from which the data was gleaned. The claimants were on their own, having to prove themselves innocent.
ReplyDeleteOne case I had was a man who had failed to show up for a child support hearing over 20 years before. Most cases are equally as innocuous. Not exactly rapists and murderers.
The whole concept was bogus.
I have dealt with several cases like this as a claims rep. I can say that I was able to clear several false identity claimants and resolve some cases where the claimant was indeed a felon, pretty quickly after some investigation. And we know that the "good cause" provisions were being ignored or overlooked in some cases. Unfortunately the way that most offices are run like assembly lines with little time to actually adjudicate or read the POMS, these claimants fell thru the crack of those who just didn't have the time nor the wherewithal to call the courts or their parole officer to get the verifications required. When the emphasis is solely on work units you have this type of activity. I have seen employees require the claimants to get proof of jail release themselves instead of accessing easily available websites and fax numbers with quick turn around times to verify warrant data. It is sad that now the FO will be inundated with these folks when proper planning could have avoided this catastrophe in the 1st place.
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