Social Security does a little, probably a very little, conflict of interest checking on its Administrative Law Judges. It sounds ineffective. Do any other agency employees receive similar treatment?
Social Security does a little, probably a very little, conflict of interest checking on its Administrative Law Judges. It sounds ineffective. Do any other agency employees receive similar treatment?
10 comments:
There is very little conflict of interest checking of any employees. We have to fill out a simple form and give it to our supervisor. If you don't fill out the form, then they don't know about your outside activities. Should a field office DM be a financial counselor on the side? Who knows.
Yes, this is a regular occurrence in the field offices for sure. If we process anything for someone with the same last name or our mother’s maiden name, we are supposed to notify management.
We are not allowed to process anything for a relative or a friend for that matter.
It can be a lot for those that live in the same area their office serves. Or if you have a very common last name.
FO employees are checked to make sure they aren't working on a relative's case. I preemptively sent emails to management if I worked on a case with the same last name.
There's very few things that can get FO employees in actual trouble, but conflict of interest issues are one of them. Most CSRs/CS are excessively cautious about handling things for people they know.
The guidelines are obviously a bit vague, but generally acquaintance is ok, friend/family is not.
ALJs who are there to "protect the program" and pay 20% or so...Don't they have a conflict of interest? Supposedly, the ALJ is to be an "unbiased" decision maker. But, wouldn't such a low pay rate demonstrate a clear bias against claimants? And, a conflict of interest?
When I was working in OHO the clerks or senior attorneys running queries would wind up on the CIRP ("chirp") report if they ran a query for someone with the same last name, from the same geographic area and similar age, etc. etc.
But since few of the judges ever ran queries, the only system of conflict checks was merely if the ALJ happened to notice something about the claimant (knew them, e.g.) and self-report.
My new agency has much more oversight on conflicts since most everyone files a 450 and is trained and reminded repeatedly to ask for an ethics opinion when confronted with any situation that could possibly need it.
SSA does not have anything like that, it's just the query/other systems logging things that might show a problem and a manager someday following up on it (maybe).
No. Low or high award rate doesn't financially advantage a decision maker.
I didn't say anything about them being financially rewarded. I qas referring to them thinking they are saving the program or the government. As such, they have a bias against claimants.
Tim, I don’t know one single person I work with at SSA that gives a damn about “saving the program money”.
We process work based on the guidelines set by Congress and the agency…period.
Would that be "anecdotal" evidence? Plenty of 20 percenters and decisions I have read, plus comments that have been made on this site...suggest otherwise.
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