I have no idea whether this is serious but Social Security has issued an emergency message to its field offices telling them to stop work on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) "5B diaries, 5H diaries, and the associated redeterminations and limited issues" because of incorrect or duplicative data received from the IRS. This may affect just a few people or a lot. It appears that it would have affected the computation of SSI benefits.
5 comments:
SSI development diaries result from data matching of SSNs against IRS tax data or data from other sources (state wage information, unemployment, etc) - IRS 1099 interest income results in 5B diaries, while pension income reported to the IRS for tax purposes results in 5H diaries.
Diaries simply flag a case for development of the specific form of income and/or resources related to that diary. The existence of a diary doesn't affect the claimant until the diary is worked.
Working the diary simply means that the income or resource indicated by the diary must be verified, evaluated, and posted to the claimant's record to determine how it will affect their payments.
Depending upon the profile of the case, the diary can result in either a limited issue redetermination or a full redetermination.
The probable reason for the halt on work is to prevent agency employees from wasting time doing duplicative or unnecessary case development until the diary information is corrected.
5B and 5H diaries are notoriously non-productive. Most of them are the result of folks withdrawing money from their 401k's or IRA's.
Waste of time.
Not always true, Anon#2
Last week, a 5B diary lead one of our SSI CRs to a guy who was getting SSI and who had been hiding the proceeds of a lawsuit settlement from SSA while he spent it down (from what I understand, it was between a quarter and half million dollars total).
Suffice it to say, he's very shortly going to find himself on the wrong side of an OIG investigation.
Withdrawal of money from an IRA or 401k is not income for SSI but the value of that asset is a countable resource for SSI and it may not have been reported before. These diaries do help SSA find hidden assets.
Nearly all retirement funds in SSI cases belong to deemors--spouse or parent--and so are excluded from resources as well. Very few of these diaries end up as anon #3 relates. And in my area, OIG is virtually useless. They totally ignore SSI fraud cases. I referred a case that was an SSI recipient who ran a contracting company and owned a race car--result?--zero response from OIG, as usual. So, anyway, Charles, no this is not a big deal.
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