Senate Hearing Today

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has scheduled a hearing for 2:30 this afternoon on Social Security Disability Fraud: Case Studies in Federal Employees and Commercial Drivers Licenses. The Chairman of the Subcommittee is Carl Levin of Michigan. Gregory Kutz of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue are supposed to testify.

From a Washington Post article today that may give some explanation for the hearing:

Almost 1,500 federal workers might have received improper or fraudulent Social Security payments in the past several years, according to a government audit disputed by the Social Security Administration.

Government Accountability Office investigators matched civilian federal payroll records with benefit data from the Social Security Disability Insurance program and the Supplemental Security Income program to yield their estimates. ...

About 7,000 federal workers received Social Security Administration (SSA) disability benefits while on the government payroll during fiscal year 2008. Almost 1,500 other federal employees may have received fraudulent or improper payments between October 2006 and December 2008, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The potentially improper or fraudulent payments totaled about $1.7 million each month, according to GAO estimates. The exact number and nature of the payments cannot be determined without detailed case investigations, the GAO said....

The SSA currently does not match its records against federal payroll records to check whether federal workers are improperly receiving payments because their salaries exceed the programs' requirements, but officials acknowledged to the GAO that such a check could be helpful.

Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue called the audit "fatally and hopelessly flawed," and said auditors improperly compared payroll data with SSA data.

"It relies on anecdotes and it inflammatorily characterized the situations it found," Astrue said in an interview. The audit provides little proof of whether the payments were improper or fraudulent and are small examples of fraud, he said. The Justice Department has declined to prosecute at least five of the 20 cases the GAO reviewed, because the payments in question fall below the threshold for prosecution, the SSA commissioner said.

Where do commercial drivers licenses fit in here? Why is Homeland Security and Government Affairs doing this hearing instead of the Senate Finance Committee?

I strongly suspect that this Committee is out of its depth here. The rules concerning Social Security disability recipients who return to work are incredibly complex. I strongly doubt that anyone at GAO or this Committee understands them. What they are casually talking about as fraud is probably nothing of the sort in most cases. I wonder if the Subcommittee staff realizes that until fairly recently Social Security had no system for keeping records on disability benefits recipients who reported return to work. That means that until recently, Social Security had no idea who had or had not reported return to work. Reports of return to work were simply ignored. That makes it a bit difficult to prosecute someone for fraud.

I am unable to see how returning to federal employment is any different than returning to other employment. All of this income is reported to Social Security and Social Security does data matches. The problem is that Social Security is many years behind in doing these data matches. Social Security is already well aware of this problem. Social Security has been prevented from getting up to date with this because of lack of personnel. If Social Security were given an extra billion or two billion dollars a year to hire more people, I guess the problem could be resolved in the foreseeable future. Social Security is not ignoring this problem because its officials are stupid or do not care. It is just that they have to also worry -- and I am being literal here -- about answering their telephone calls in less than seven or eight minutes and keeping the lines at their offices from routinely extending out their doors. The problem of delayed earnings records matches is only one of many problems leading to overpayments at Social Security. They are not going to be resolved without spending a lot of money.