From a solicitation posted by Social Security:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) plans to issue a solicitation for a streamlined remittance process and an automated system solution to collect fees from SSA's field offices for non-programmatic services. The total system solution, Social Security Remittance System, (SERS) will provide 1300 field offices with an automated solution to collect, track, record, and report on fees collected for providing various non-programmatic services to individuals and third parties.
10 comments:
And so goes world class service. Almost all third party actions are in some fashion connected to claimants needs.
Yes, this will be a shock to those who think they get everything they need from government for free. It is best for everyone to have skin in the game via taxes, user fees, tariffs, etc. Waste, fraud, and abuse in government is much less tolerated by those who have to pay the bills. There is a cost of doing business for everything, and that cost for government is increasingly being imposed upon a smaller and smaller population while an increasing segment of society expects their wants to be provided for as "rights" at no or very subsidized rates. There are limits to everything, and the need for SSA to collect this type of fee is another reminder to embrace change and hope for the best.
"cost for government is increasingly being imposed upon a smaller and smaller population".
Excuse me but are you talking about the rich who produce goods in foreign countries and sell them to the american people who suddenly are unable to pay FICA taxes(social security)because their job has been eliminated because of outsourcing but the rich people are ok because they keep their profits in banks and or other intruments contributing to the financial destruction of this once great nation?
You may wish to thank your Unions for that. An automotive Union that lays off it's workers for three months of the year while continuing to pay them 90% of their salary can not stay profitable for long. By the way, these were high school employees 18-25 years old making $80,000.00-90,000 a year 35 years ago..
These fees are FOIA related. About 98% confident of this.
I'll bet everyone has the big factory rep services that advertize on the Internet to thank for this. They send requests for hundreds of records to whatever local office has the misfortune to be near them - no matter where the claimant lives - in an attempt to pre-screen their client list. This overwhelms the local office and means they have trouble providing services for the claimants in their service area. So, you all can talk to your cohorts about what happened to make this necessary and to Congress that keeps cutting SSA's budget. Don't blame SSA!
I thought we already had a process of doing these "fees"? This solicitation is another example of some money going to outsiders, can't a group of folks already working at the agency figure this out?
Charge for replacement SSN cards, funding problems old
This is just a new system to process fees that SSA already collects. SSA charges fees for non-SSA program related things, like copying files for attorneys in private litigation, verifying benefits for 3rd parties. Nothing new as far as actual fees.
Private litigation (i.e. personal injury and product liability) constitutes the majority of these fees. Lots of private attorneys use SSA as their personal data warehouse, dropping large numbers of requests for copies of files on field offices. Since the standardized fees came into effect, SSA now requires them to pay upfront to get the records (where, in the past, we sent the records and billed them and didn't track whether they paid or not -- many of them didn't).
Now, as the $$$ involved have shown it is a worthwhile investment, SSA needs a system to handle it better than a feature poor internally developed website. That is what this solicitation is about, creating such a system.
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