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Sep 4, 2013

Vietnamese Immigrants Bring Class Action In San Diego Over Attorney Suspension

     From the Courthouse News Service:
Hundreds of disabled Vietnamese refugees claim in a federal class action that the Social Security Commissioner wrongfully suspended the only fluent Vietnamese-speaking attorney in San Diego, to retaliate for a previous class action that claimed a Social Security judge was biased.
Lead plaintiff Truyen Gia Phan sued Acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn W. Colvin in a federal class action, on behalf of a class of more than 1,000.
Truyen, his 25 named co-plaintiffs and the class all are "poor, disabled and non-English speaking Vietnamese former prisoner[s] of war and refugees in the United States" who have applied or will apply for Social Security benefits. All of them have been or will be represented by attorney Alexandra Nga Tran Manbeck.
Manbeck has been "providing indispensable representation to the Vietnamese plaintiffs who would otherwise be shut out of court by virtue of her fluency in the Vietnamese language and her ability to advise the plaintiffs in Vietnamese, since plaintiffs did not speak English and had no understanding of administrative and judicial proceedings," Truyen says in the complaint.
On March 12 this year, the Social Security Administration suspended Manbeck from the practice of Social Security law, the complaint states.
The class claims Manbeck was suspended to retaliate for her filing of a class action on behalf of Nazdar Alzayadi and Nora Donate in 2011, alleging bias from Administrative Law Judge Eve Godfrey. That case was dismissed, according to the new complaint. ...
The class claims the Social Security Administration suspended Manbeck for two classes of alleged violations: "filing of Request for Reconsideration and Request for Review in paper forms instead of being filed in electronic forms, and (2) the plaintiff's signing of boilerplate forms allowing the plaintiffs to ask the Commissioner to send payment checks to the plaintiffs' representative to pay outstanding costs."

6 comments:

  1. Weird. I have plenty of clients of Vietnamese descent in the SoCal area, including San Diego. Most speak some English. And the SSA will provide an interpreter if needed at the hearing. Not exactly sure the merits of the lawsuit. Know ALJ Godfrey and she is tough. Most of the San Diego ALJs are OK. If this attorney was suspended for filing a class action suit, then totally merit based.

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  2. Vietnam war ended 40 years ago--why would they not be speaking English? Not being mean, just really curious.

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  3. The "'filing of Request for Reconsideration and Request for Review in forms instead of being filed in <sic/. electronic forms'" doest not seem to be the type action that would justify the SUSPENSION of a representative, even if done repeatedly and after (s)he was warned.

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  4. Suspension due to filing paper appeals rather than electronic is pretext. There already is a remedy for that, which is to refuse direct payment of fee to the rep. There is something else going on here.

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  5. doubt if she got in trouble for filing paper appeals, it's probably for having/making "plaintiff's signing of boilerplate forms allowing the plaintiffs to ask the Commissioner to send payment checks to the plaintiffs' representative to pay outstanding costs."

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  6. In other words, the rep (because she was charging the claimants a fee) was absolutely violating Section 207 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C 407) by convincing the clients to redirect their funds to her.

    https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.NSF/lnx/0202410001

    The issue about paper appeal forms was likely something that was just tacked on as an additional violation supporting suspension -- in and of itself, it normally wouldn't be a big deal unless she was just absolutely dumping piles and piles of paper appeals onto local offices.

    I'd say it was probably a pretty egregious situation if the agency actually went so far as to suspend the rep. Heck, I once caught a national rep firm once whose staff was actually forging claimant signatures on just about every document they submitted to SSA (including paper benefit applications, SSA-1696 forms, fee agreements, etc) and the agency didn't do anything more to them than contact them to tell them not to do it anymore.

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