Controversy Over Benefits For Children In Foster Care

     CBS News is reporting on the issue of what happens to Social Security dependent benefits for children who end up in foster care. In most cases, the state applies for and receives the dependent benefits. The child receives nothing. The child usually doesn't know this is happening or has happened. The theory is that the states need this money to pay for foster care. The contra argument is that the foster care is often terrible and it's not the state's money to begin with. This controversy has been around forever.

    I note the contrast with SSI child's benefits where a child's parent or guardian must establish a separate bank account to receive the benefits for a child and must show how the money was spent. Not so with Title II dependent benefits. The state just gobbles up the money.

    Social Security's new Commissioner, Martin O'Malley, is quoted in the piece as opposing what's going on. However, he has no authority that I can think of to do anything about this.

Children Being Raised By Their Grandparents Poorly Served By Social Security

     From How Can Social Security Children's Benefits Help Grandparents Raise Grandchildren?, by Liu, Siyan, and Laura D. Quinby of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:

In 2020, around two million grandparents were responsible for the basic needs of their grandchildren, with grandparent care concentrated in historically disadvantaged communities. Despite being particularly vulnerable to financial insecurity, most grandparents are ineligible for formal support -- such as subsidies for foster parents, housing assistance, and Social Security dependent child benefits -- because they raise their grandchildren outside of the foster care system. Using the Health and Retirement Study and American Community Survey, this study documents how grandparent caregivers differ from typical grandparents in terms of time and money spent on grandchildren, demographic characteristics, and economic resources. It then evaluates how their finances would improve if eligibility for child benefits were aligned with the more lenient tax criteria for claiming a dependent grandchild.

    Being "outside of the foster care system" is definitely a problem but the Social Security aspect of it is that if you're on retirement benefits from Social Security, only your minor children and adult children who became disabled before age 22 can obtain child's benefits on your account. Your grandchildren are only eligible for these child benefits under very limited circumstances. 

    The children could get benefits if the grandparents adopted them but the grandparents are generally scared to try. The problem is that usually the children come to live with their grandparents because the parents have serious problems with substance abuse, other mental illness or are abusive. The grandparents are scared to rock the boat with an adoption petition. The parents may take the children back to a disordered, dangerous environment.

    The Social Security Act could be altered to give children's benefits to grandchildren in the custody of their grandparents. A change along these lines would certainly be family friendly but at this point no Social Security legislation, whatever its merits, can pass Congress.

Let Me Circle Back To This

     Let me circle back to the article I posted about yesterday concerning a man being asked to repay money allegedly overpaid in 1978. Here's a part of the article I didn't quote yesterday (emphasis added):

Byrd's father died when he was 4 years old. So his mother received social security for him while he was a minor. 

"This is not money I ever saw. I was not even living at home at the time," he said.

    This suggests how the overpayment occurred.  His mother wasn't entitled to the child's benefits she received on him because he wasn't living with her. So how is this an overpayment to him? His mother took money from him. He was the one injured back in 1978 and you're now compounding the injury by trying to force him to repay money that was taken from him?

Should State Agencies Serving As Rep Payees For Children Be Allowed To Seize The Children's Social Security Benefits To Pay For Their Care?

     From WUNC, an NPR station

To Teresa Casados, who runs the department in charge of child welfare in New Mexico, it seemed like an odd question. At a legislative hearing in July, a lawmaker asked her if the state was taking the Social Security checks of kids in foster care — the checks intended for orphans and disabled children.

"My reaction really was: That can't be right," said Casados, who in the spring took over as acting secretary of New Mexico's Children, Youth & Families Department. "That can't be a practice that we're doing." ...

Casados and her chief legal counsel drove back to the office. "When we got back, we looked into it and found out it was a practice that the agency had for using those benefits — and had been going on for quite some time." ...

[L]ast month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration sent a letter to state and local child welfare agencies to encourage these changes.

The NPR/Marshall Project investigation found that in at least 49 states and the District of Columbia, when young people go into foster care child, welfare agencies routinely look for which ones come with Social Security checks. Or, if the children are eligible, agencies sign them up for benefits. Then state agencies cash those checks — usually without telling the child or their family, the investigation found. ...

Just days after that legislative hearing in New Mexico, Casados says her department "sent out a directive to cease using those funds for care and support." It pledged to start putting aside the Social Security benefits checks for foster children to have when they go back to their families or age out of foster care. ...

Where Are The Missing Children?

      From The Hill:

… Recently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) began publishing statistics on beneficiaries by race. There are approximately 260,000 Black children receiving survivor benefits from Social Security. With nearly 1 million orphaned Black children in the country, a natural question policymakers should ask is “Where are the missing beneficiaries?”

Black children may miss out on survivor benefits because of eligibility requirements, such as the parent not having sufficient work in Social Security-covered employment. Policymakers should acknowledge the reality on the ground and ask whether those eligibility requirements need to be updated.

Black children also miss out on survivor benefits because of mistakes by SSA, a lack of awareness of benefit eligibility, and budget cuts to SSA’s administrative budget. …

Former Foster Care Children Find That Answers Are Hard To Come By

     From WITF:

It’s been almost 45 years since Kathy Stolz-Silvis was in foster care in Pennsylvania. Stolz-Silvis was nine when her father died, making her and her siblings eligible for Social Security survivor benefits. But she didn’t become aware of those benefits until decades later — after reading an investigation published by The Marshall Project and NPR.

The report, published last year, found that foster care agencies in at least 49 states and Washington, D.C., have been applying for Social Security on behalf of foster youth in their care who are eligible for death, disability or veterans’ benefits. The agencies often keep the money, often without notifying the children, their family members or lawyers. ...

“Out of curiosity, I called them to find out what happened to my benefits when I was in foster care,” Stolz-Silvis said. “The person on the other end of the line told me they were not allowed to give me that information.”

In recent months, The Marshall Project and NPR have heard from dozens of former foster youth who described similar failed efforts to learn whether a state or local agency had applied to become their “representative payee,” allowing the agency to receive their federal benefits, a process permitted by federal regulations. ...

In an email, Darren Lutz, a spokesperson for the Social Security Administration, said that for those inquiring about past benefits: “We maintain records on the benefits we have paid and can answer their questions.”  ...

Jayden Kiley was 17 and in foster care when her mother died, and she became eligible for death benefits from Social Security. But for eight months, between October 2019 and July 2020, she said, nobody told her about the benefits — or that her mother had even died. She found that out from a sibling.

“I didn’t know any of this,” Kiley said.

For two years, Kiley tried to get information from Social Security about her benefits, but she said that a representative told her that every time she called she was put at the bottom of a waitlist, so she stopped calling for a while. Eventually she found out the amount due to her is about $8,500, but said she hasn’t received any of it. ...

    In case you're wondering, those who were in foster care are definitely entitled to information on what happened to any Social Security benefits they were entitled to as a minor but they aren't entitled to get the money back if it was paid to a foster care agency unless there was some unusual situation such as a child coming out of foster care but the foster care agency mistakenly continuing to receive payments from Social Security.