Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report in September 2005 calling upon the agency to do better follow-up of the offsets that reduce Social Security disability benefits due to workers compensation benefits. At the time, Social Security had a large backlog of cases to work through. OIG decided to take a look at what Social Security has done in response to that report. The report is discouraging. Social Security had done little or nothing, with the result being:
...the volume of cases with WC [Workers Compensation] claims pending for 2 or more years increased from 227,615 in January 2005 to 268,825 in November 2009, an 18-percent increase over the past 4 years. In addition, we estimated SSA had overpaid Title II beneficiaries between $44 and $58 million because of unreported WC payments since our [earlier report].The reason that Social Security has not taken action on this problem:
An official from the Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Operations told us the Agency plans to pursue processing its pending WC workload to the extent possible. However, according to this official, SSA resources are limited, and the Agency must take a holistic approach in applying those resources, considering many other priority workloads.Inadequate budgets and the staffing shortages that result from inadequate budgets cost money.
5 comments:
The simple solution would be to eliminate the WC offset by statute. This historically complex and neglected workload is more trouble than it's worth.
Of course, knowing SSA, this will result in a "crisis du jour" mentality, causing more concentration of resources and resulting in the neglect of all the other "priority" workloads (take your pick of around 40-50).
There are a lot of workloads that could be addressed by Congress changing this or that aspect of the law, but it won't happen. The simplest thing is to higher more people to process the workloads, and Congress can't even manage to do that. The Obama agenda will result in hundreds of thousand of additional bureaucrats for new programs, but SSA is thrown the scraps--a few hundred hires here, a few hundred there.SSA already exists, so Obama is not interested. He wants to expand govt with new programs that he can put his name on.
The problem is that there has never been leadership in SSA (at least in my 30 years)which took a truly active role in legislative matters. The agency is saddled with laws that make no sense, or acquiescing with ridiculous court decisions that cost the taxpayers far more than the attendant results save or benefit the public. Good recent example is the fugitive felon stuff; go back some time and look at the Zebley process.
A real Commissioner would fight hard with the WH and OMB to reform the program--and I'm not talking about solvency issues, necessarily. I'm talking about the mundane, petty crap that SSA managers and employees deal with daily-artificial goals for a gazillion SSI "diaries", "outreach" to sell Part D Medicare subsidies, etc. This has nothing to do with who's President or who controls Congress. It's all about a bureaucratic culture which can't see the forest for the trees. Give all Federal agencies (including SSA, and yes, DOD) a 15% budget cut to help with the deficit and you'd see real change.
A truly activist
Many many technicians do not have a clue as to how fo process a WC case. They have been very poorly trained and not interested in any lengthy analysis which is sometimes required. Most managers do not allow enough time for processing WC cases anyway.
I am anon # 2 and I mostly agree with anon # 3 except for the 15 percent budget cut--those cuts always fall disproportionatley on the field, not on Central Office nor the Regional offices. You are right--no leadership in SSA to take the fight to Congress and the President. It would take a highly publicized, knock-down, drag-out confrontation with a COSS threat of resigning to start moving the wheels, and I don't see that happening.
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