Social Security has issued new instructions on dealing with same sex marriage cases. Social Security's Administrative Law Judges are now instructed to cancel any scheduled hearing dealing with this issue and to not make a decision in any case that has already been heard. I don't know how many of these cases there may be but I'd bet the vast majority of them are couples who still live in the state in which they were married. I know there are issues with cases where the parties to the marriage have moved to a state that refuses to recognize same sex marriage but there is no issue when the parties live in the state where they were married. How long should it take to write instructions for these cases?
6 comments:
Obviously you have no idea how complicated the issue is for SSA. It's really easy to sit there on the outside and just say "pay them".
I'm in a state that doesn't recognize same sex marriages, unions or any of that stuff. We just had a couple go to New York to get married, then come back to change their name on their SSN card. They didn't mention anything about getting benefits. Upon further investigation, one on the couple is on SSI. What a mess! Deeming, the system won't take a same sex spouse - bet they get divorced when it cuts off her benefits. That's what regular couples do.
The computer system can't be changed overnight to accept a marriage with the same gender codes. It was programmed to reject that as a way to prevent errors, just like it can't take numbers in name fields.
Programmers need to start planning now for when the SCOTUS decides you can have two spouses or marry an animal. It'll probably be about 20 years the way our culture is going.
The DAA statute was passed in 1996 but SSA didn't get around to issuing an SSR on the subject until 2013.
The claims taking programs, MCS and MSSICS, have been slowly moving away from whatever is the antique platform they were built on and toward a web based program. Not sure what programming change would have to be made to allow same sex marriages in those programs and I wonder why there was no contingency plan for it, but the focus has not been on keeping those programs. I also wonder how many of the current IT staff even have the knowledge to tweak those antique programs. I envision a lot of manual computations and manual actions needed or a wholesale jump from the MCS/MSSICS systems to a new untested system.
Whatever happened to the full faith and credit clause in the constitution?
I hope you're wrong about the manual comps. I have no faith in the CR's in my office to get those right. What a mess.
Post a Comment