Social Security's Acting Commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, has sent a letter to the Chairman of the House Social Security Subcommittee detailing her agency's efforts to prevent or detect fraud in disability claims. It sounds as if a fair amount of Social Security's scarce resources will be devoted to this effort. I expect that Republicans will be disappointed with the results since I expect that little organized fraud will be found.
8 comments:
Perhaps little organized but PLENTY of individual fraud cases out there.
Which SSA has no resources to investigate/pursue.
You do not need special resources, you just need SSA employees to do a thorough job -- the DO staff should check for recent income and resources; the DDS DRs should not accept at face value CEs that just reguritate the claimant's allegations; ALJs should look at the evidence closely and question the claimant about discrepancies in the evidence, instead of just accepting the check-the-box forms the representatives love to submit and which often are not worth the paper on which they are written; the PC needs to investigate evidence of work activity by beneficiaries.
News flash for 3:42--there are no employees. There are barely enough employees just to take new claims, and not enough to process routine p/e events. There are fo's where the cr's have to take dib claims every 90 minutes, and fo's which have no p/e appts available. No funding/staff for out-of-office investigations. Thus, no staff to investigate fraud.
When you do nothing to investigate fraud, in fact look the other way when evidence of fraud is clearly present, does one really expect the report to document fraud exists?
SSA OIG staffing has been decimated. No one to investigate allegations where the power of law enforcement is needed. There are tens of millions of dollars of overpayments on dead centenarians not being recovered from the direct deposit bank accounts. Scandalous.
I agree with 3:42. It is true that SSA employees are overworked, and it seems easier to turn a blind eye to discrepancies. When they apply a critical eye and ear to their interviews and the claims, and stop accepting allegations at face value, they will reduce the fraud. But it may take a bit more time and that is sorely lacking in SSA.
And what about the disabled person who very often reports working and are told that he/she can still receive checks (trial work period)? SSA has the wage reports within months after the end of the year (W-2s now go to SSA); their staff shortage is so bad that claimant work reports are most often not followed-up when needed (at the end of the trial work period); and the disabled person, having been told they are due checks while working, doesn't understand all the convoluted SSA rules so doesn't know that he/she is being paid incorrectly. Having told the claimant that checks continue, SSA bears responsibility to re-contact the claimant and document before, say, 10 years passes. In these circumstances, for SSA (or anyone else) to say the claimant is committing fraud is just wrong.
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