GAO Report Looms -- Actually, Now It's Here And It's Got Problems

     NBC is saying that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will release a study on Sunday (GAO releasing a report on Sunday?) saying that $1.29 billion in Social Security disability benefits were paid to 36,000 people who had too much income from employment to qualify for benefits.

     To those who deal with Social Security disability every day there is nothing surprising about this. Some disability benefits recipients don't report that they have returned to work. Some people say they have reported their return to work but Social Security didn't do anything -- and this was a major problem until a few years ago and may, to some extent, remain a problem. What is supposed to happen is that Social Security uses reported earnings to catch these cases, stop payment of benefits and declare overpayments. The problem is that Social Security doesn't have enough manpower to deal with this on a timely basis. Thus, people who shouldn't be getting benefits remain in payment status for years. You want to deal with this problem, give Social Security more operating funds. With sequestration causing further cuts in Social Security's manpower, the problem just gets worse. It's simple. Those who cry the loudest about this sort of thing are the same people who are most responsible for Social Security's inability to deal with this sort of thing on a timely basis.
     Update: The report was actually released today. The report notes that:

During this review, SSA [Social Security Administration] officials told us that limited resources and competing workloads may have constrained the agency’s ability to act promptly when it received earnings alerts or self-reported earnings for beneficiaries from our nongeneralizable examples described above. We also reported in April 2013 that budget decisions and the way SSA prioritizes competing demands, such as processing initial claims, contribute to challenges SSA faces in maintaining the integrity of the disability program.

     Social Security also told GAO that it thought that GAO's method for computing the amount of overpayments was unreliable and could lead to "substantial overstatement.". As an example of the problems with GAO's method, GAO assumed that anyone who performed work during their waiting period would never be eligible for benefits. Social Security's response was that in many cases work during the waiting period was short lived and would lead, at most, to finding a later date for onset of disability which would mean, at most, a small overpayment. GAO's report suggests to me that GAO did not even understand the point that Social Security was making. I'm pretty sure that GAO has never heard of an Unsuccessful Work Attempt (UWA). Anyone involved to a significant extent with the Social Security disability programs will realize that if GAO believes that every UWA makes a person permanently ineligible for benefits, the GAO report has to be seriously misleading. GAO's mindset seems to have been "If you work after the date you say you become disabled, you can't be disabled. Period. End of discussion. For good reasons that I won't belabor here, that's not the law, nor should it be the law. Things are far more complicated that GAO seems to have undersood. The problem is that GAO's report makes for a nice headline. SSA's response doesn't.