Here are excerpts from an article in the New York Post:
The MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority] voted Wednesday to raise the price of weekly and monthly MetroCards, while nixing bonuses on pay-per-ride cards — as one of its board members blasted the decision, saying straphangers are the ones getting “screwed.” ...
Ahead of the vote, board member Andrew Saul explained why he was voting against the plan, saying, “The riders are getting screwed.”
“This is a bloated bureaucracy,” Saul said. “This thing is full of waste … I think it’s dead wrong to put this thing on the riders.” ...I don't know how much this reflects upon Andrew Saul's qualifications to become Commissioner of Social Security. However, I do know that Republican officeholders almost always oppose additional government revenues even if that inevitably causes degradation in government functioning. The claim is that additional revenues aren't needed because of governmental "waste, fraud and abuse". I'm sure that most Republican officeholders actually believe the "waste, fraud and abuse" claims but I'm also sure that most are either indifferent to declines in government service or actually favor such declines.
At least in this article, Saul doesn't identify what waste it is that he would like to get rid of so that the fare increase can be avoided. That's generally how it works. Republican either cannot identify the "waste, fraud and abuse" they want to get rid of or or the "waste, fraud and abuse" they do identify is low level stuff that has no appreciable effect upon an agency's budget and can no more be totally eliminated than shoplifting can be totally eliminated by a retail store.
If Saul comes into the position of Social Security Commissioner believing that there must be terrible waste and inefficiency at Social Security that he can eliminate, he's in for a rude awakening. It's not there.
They believe there is waste, fraud, and abuse. They also believe the best way to address it is by cutting the people to investigate it, especially when it involves contracting work out.
ReplyDeleteSSA does not have anyone to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse within the system. Or at least they don't have anyone who sees that as their primary job. They have an Inspector General, just as every agency does. In most agencies the IG is feared by the agency as they are like the internal affairs until in a large police department - they are looking for bad apples, waste, failure to follow proper procedures and similar things within the agency. But it appears that the IG at SSA is devoted to investigation of claimants for committing fraud. It is NOT the same thing. SSA needs an IG that investigates IG. Imagine, for example, the IG looking at ALJ stats and correlating ALJs who are responsible for the largest number of EAJA payments and then issuing a report calling for their retraining or termination. That is what would happen in a normal IG if were suggested by, say, a member of Congress.
ReplyDeleteSSA needs a separate investigation unit that investigates fraudulent claims. They are out there. They are not as many as the Republicans think there are but they do exist. But this should not be the job of the IG. It should be turned over to someone else who could then report to the IG if they found that there was claims fraud that was done with the assistance of a SSA employee. A real IG would eliminate waste if they would investigate some of the enormous waste that occurs every time a disabled claimant is turned down when they should not have been because either a state agency adjudicator is an idiot that doesn't do their job, or relies on a quack state agency doctor that hasn't really read the record, or the case goes to an ALJ who thinks its his or her job to keep people off disability.
Umm... the Office of Anti-Fraud Programs and OAO's Division of Quality.
ReplyDelete