Après Moi Le Déluge

      From Government Executive:

…  Shares in Fiserv, a financial technology company that processes credit and debit card payments on behalf of businesses and financial institutions, fell more than 40%, or $30 billion in market value, on Wednesday, after CEO Mike Lyons withdrew earnings forecasts originally issued by his predecessor, Bisignano. The stock price fell another 7.1% Thursday.

According to trade publication PaymentsDive, Lyons said that Bisignano’s earnings targets “would have been objectively difficult to achieve, even with the right investment and strong execution.” But instead, Fiserv had in recent years deferred needed investments and cut costs in pursuit of shoring up short-term profit margins. …

The Commissioner Has A Serious Problem Related To The Company He Used To Run

      From Financial Advisor:

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s move into government couldn’t have been better timed, helping the former Fiserv Inc. chief avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from the company’s plunging stock price. 

After the former Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive was tapped by President Donald Trump this year to lead the SSA, he agreed to resign from Fiserv and divest his stake, including common stock, options, restricted stock units and performance equity grants. Bisignano, 66, was also named CEO of the Internal Revenue Service earlier this month. 

Following his resignation, the restricted stock and a portion of the performance grants vested, giving him more than 3.2 million Fiserv shares worth roughly $594 million when he was confirmed to his role in May.  

Bisignano sold Fiserv stock between May 16 and July 1, according to ethics filings. Based on the average share price during the period, the shares would have fetched roughly $530 million. He later confirmed in a filing that he had completed the divestment.  

The same shares today are worth just $229 million—meaning that selling earlier in the year avoided losses of about $300 million. 

Accepting the government role gave Bisignano another valuable perk. In May, he was granted a certificate of divestiture, deferring capital gains tax on the Fiserv sales provided he invested the proceeds in approved assets such as Treasury bills or broadly-based mutual funds. 

Bisignano didn’t respond to messages seeking comment. 

More than half of Bisignano’s potential losses would have come Wednesday, when the payment company’s shares suffered a record plunge of more than 40% after it slashed its full-year earnings outlook and delivered third-quarter results well short of analysts’ estimates. 

     Did the serious problems at Fiserv only begin AFTER Bisignano left? That seems unlikely on the face of it. Was Bisignano aware of the problems BEFORE he left? That seems likely. If he knew of major problems, why hadn’t he told investors?  If he knew, why was he selling stock based upon inside information? 

     The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would ordinarily investigate this sort of thing but this is the Trump Administration. Nobody in the Trump Administration gets investigated. However, they can’t stop shareholder litigation and I would expect that soon. Bisignano will have to answer questions under oath. 

     By the way, Bisignano needs two lawyers, one for the possible securities litigation and the other for possible criminal charges. Trump won’t be in office forever. Unless he gets a pardon, Bisignano could face criminal charges later. 

     This seems like it could be  a serious distraction to a man with two jobs.

      Update: The litigation has already begun.

     Further Update: Here’s an explanation of what is being alleged:

… Fiserv faces a federal securities class-action lawsuit in the Southern District of New York that accuses the company of inflating growth figures for its Clover payments platform. The complaint alleges Fiserv forced merchants on its older and more affordable Payeezy system to move to Clover while claiming that growth came from new customers. Those migrations allegedly artificially boosted short-term revenue and transaction volumes forecasts which in turn hid slowing organic expansion. When many merchants decided to switch to lower-cost rivals such as Square and Toast, Clover’s performance faltered. According to the lawsuit, former CEO Frank Bisignano told investors in 2023 that 90% of Clover’s revenue growth would come from new merchants and just 10% from existing clients, even as the company moved roughly 200,000 Payeezy merchants to Clover through mid-2024. That shift helped lift Clover’s 2024 revenue to $2.7 billion on $310 billion in gross payment volume, but by early 2025, gross payment volume growth slowed to 8%, down from 14%-17% the year before. …

Read About The Wonderful Work Bisignano Is Doing

       There’s a Bisignano puff piece in the Washington Examiner, I suppose that it will please the paid shills commenting here. Does anyone, even on the right, take the Washington Examiner seriously. It’s self consciously a propaganda outlet. No, it’s not a right wing equivalent of the Post. It’s almost a caricature.

     By the way, I don’t mean to demean Bisignano too much. In his own way, he’s probably trying to be a good guy. It’s just that he’s working in a horrifyingly incompetent and dishonest Administration that barely hides its contempt for Social Security. He’s far more devoted to puffing up Trump than running a competent agency. I don’t understand why anyone thinks Trump is deserving of blind loyalty but Bisignano is not alone.

Conflict Of Interest?

      From the Baltimore Sun:

Congressional Democrats are investigating whether Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano knew — and should have disclosed — that his company stood to benefit from a huge contract overseeing a debit card program serving millions of recipients of Social Security and other programs, The Baltimore Sun has learned.

The Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff, led by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, is exploring whether Bisignano knew during his confirmation procedures that the firm, Fiserv, had bid — or was planning to — on a pending 5-year Direct Express contract, which distributes government benefits to about 3.4 million Americans via prepaid cards, a committee spokesperson said.

Another Democrat, Connecticut Rep. John Larson, told The Sun that Bisignano’s “connection to Fiserv certainly raises questions about Treasury’s new contract. Especially as he moves to end paper checks for monthly benefits, which could push hundreds of thousands of Americans over to Direct Express, he has a responsibility to be transparent about any potential conflicts of interest.” …

The contract was awarded to Fifth Third, an Ohio-based bank, and began on Sept. 9, according to the company’s news release that day naming Money Network Financial, LLC as the program’s manager. Money Network Financial is a subsidiary of Fiserv, the company Bisignano headed as chairman and CEO until stepping down on May 6 to take over the federal agency. ….

Bisignano At IRS

        There are so many issues with Frank Bisignano's position as "CEO" of IRS. Let me list three that I know of:

• Bisignano is the 8th person to serve as head of the IRS in the eight and a half months that Trump has been back in the White House. The IRS can no longer carry out its core missions because it has fired a quarter of its employees. Why would anyone in their right mind want the job of CEO of such a disaster zone? And you thought that Social Security is a mess!
• The head of IRS is supposed to be the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, not the "CEO." It appears that the President is making up a title to get around submitting a new nomination for Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
• Why not submit a nomination? The nominee would face a confirmation hearing where he or she would have to answer questions Trump doesn't want answered, such as whether the nominee will continue illegally sharing data with ICE and whether the nominee will use the IRS to investigate the President's enemies. Also, the chaos at IRS would be a major topic.

Just When You Think Things Can’t Get Any More Absurd

      From The Hill:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced the head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) would also serve as CEO of the IRS after the tax agency’s previous, Senate-confirmed leader was ousted.

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano will take on the additional role of CEO of the IRS, where he will oversee day-to-day operations. But Bessent will continue to serve as the acting IRS commissioner, giving him autonomy over the agency. …

Again, Mr. Commissioner, What Are You Going To Do About These Payment Errors?

      From a recent report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:

The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program provides monthly benefits to retired and disabled workers and their dependents as well as the survivors of deceased workers. In general, to be entitled to benefits, a child of a retired, disabled, or deceased worker must: 1) be unmarried; 2) be under age 18, a full-time elementary or secondary school student under age 19, or have become disabled before age 22; and 3) meet certain relationship and dependency requirements. Generally, an SSA employee may appropriately deny a claim when the employee properly completes all necessary actions and determines the applicant has not established the claimant meets the requirements to be entitled to child’s insurance benefits. 

We reviewed a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 21,533 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 that SSA employees approved for benefits in July 2023 or earlier and a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 75,424 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 SSA employees did not approve for benefits as of July 2023. 

Of the 96,957 claims in our review, we estimate SSA employees correctly denied 37,712 (39 percent) and incorrectly denied 24,555 (25 percent). As a result of employee errors, SSA did not pay these beneficiaries approximately $92.2 million in benefits and delayed paying these beneficiaries approximately $87.7 million in benefits to which they were entitled. 

We could not conclude whether employees correctly denied the remaining 34,690 claims (36 percent). This includes an estimated 28,661 claims SSA employees denied before they appropriately completed all required actions; therefore, there was not enough information in SSA’s records to determine whether Agency employees appropriately denied the claims. …

     This might be tough for the Commissioner. I don’t think it can be solved by laying off employees or intimidating them or demanding they work harder.  It will take analysis of the difficulties in doing this work accurately, coming up with better workflow processes, coming up with better quality control processes and being honest with everyone about the workforce needed to do the job properly. The honesty part will be the hardest thing for this Administration. It’s easier to blame the “deep state” than to do the difficult work of governing. 

OK, Mr. Bisignano, You Want To Reduce Payment Errors, What Are You Going To Do About This?

      From Follow-up on Dually Entitled Beneficiaries and Family Maximum Provisions, a report by Social Security’s Inspector General:

 … This is a follow up to our 2014 audit of the Adjustment of Monthly Benefits Under the Family Maximum Provisions. For our current audit, we identified 23,603 Social Security records with dually entitled beneficiaries and at least 2 other beneficiaries who had a date of entitlement of May 2013 or later and were in current pay status as of May 2023. We selected a random sample of 225 records for review.  …

We estimate SSA correctly adjusted benefits in accordance with the family maximum provisions for 15,211 of the 23,603 wage earners’ records in our population (64 percent); however, SSA improperly paid approximately $114 million to spouses and children on 8,392 wage earners’ records (36 percent). …

It's A Vicious World Out There

     There's an interesting video floating about the interwebs saying that Social Security's Commissioner is wearing shirts monogrammed with the initials FJB which they say stands for F*** Joe Biden. He does wear shirts with that monogram but the video is completely misleading since FJB happens to be the Commissioner's own initials. 

     While we’re talking about the Commissioner’s apparel, I’ve seen pictures of him wearing kiltee loafers. I don’t think I’ve seen those on many other men in a long time. I wouldn’t have thought they still made them.

The Untold Story

      Pro Publica has a fascinating piece titled The Untold Story of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security. You’ll want to read the entire article. Here are just a few snippets:

On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.” …

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.” …

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?” 

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly. 

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor. … 

In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic. 

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.” … 

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.” … 

[Behind] the scenes, [Dudek] began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. … 

As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency. …

Hearing On Removing Barriers To Employment

      From a press release:

House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08), Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Ron Estes (KS-04), and Work & Welfare Subcommittee Chairman Darin LaHood (IL-16) announced today that the Subcommittees on Social Security and Work & Welfare will hold a joint hearing to discuss barriers to work and how policymakers can support opportunities for individuals with disabilities to establish, renew, or strengthen their connection to the workforce. The hearing will take place on Tuesday, September 9, 2025, at 2:00 PM in 1100 Longworth House Office Building.

     Republican ideas for removing “barriers” have sometimes included time limited disability benefits. I think they regard the lack of compulsion to return to work as a “barrier.”I do not expect anything coming out of this hearing that would genuinely help anyone drawing benefits.

     By the way, when are they going to reschedule that hearing with the Commissioner? Ever?

Bisignano A Prayer Leader

      Frank Bisignano is an "Executive Leader for Prayer" on "The Presidential Prayer Team."

COSS On Fox Business

      The Commissioner of Social Security has appeared on Fox Business to claim that his agency is now providing the best service to the public that it has ever provided.

Commissioner In West Virginia

      From a press release issued yesterday: 

… U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) hosted Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano in Charleston, W.Va. to visit the social security field office. During the visit, Senator Capito and Commissioner Bisignano met with staff to discuss the improved customer service taking place. …

Problem Solved

 

    If you’ve paid attention to the statements of Commissioner Bisignano you may have noticed that every chance he has had he’s talked about the terrible ratings that Social Security employees have given their agency as an employer, the worst of any large federal agency. He has expressed a strong desire to do something about these ratings, which are derived from surveys done by the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 

     The Commissioner can stop worrying about the problem. It’s been solved. OPM has decided to stop doing the surveys.

A Presidential Proclamation

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act -- a monumental legislative achievement that protects our seniors, uplifts our citizens, and sustains the livelihoods of hardworking Americans who devoted their professions to bettering our country. On the 90th anniversary of the establishment of this historic program, I recommit to always defending Social Security, rewarding the men and women who make our country prosperous, and taking care of our own workers, families, seniors, and citizens first. 

To this day, Social Security is rooted in a simple promise: those who gave their careers to building our Nation will always have the support, stability, and relief they deserve. Thanks to my Administration's efforts, Social Security now stands stronger and more resilient than ever before. Following the passage of the historic One Big Beautiful Bill last month, the vast majority of seniors who receive Social Security will pay zero tax on their Social Security benefits -- the largest tax break for seniors in the history of our country. 

To further strengthen Social Security, my Administration is aggressively rooting out all fraud, waste, and abuse that rob our Federal programs of resources -- including stopping payments to the deceased and eliminating benefits for those who do not legally qualify. These measures will save American taxpayers billions of dollars every year and ensure that future generations receive the benefits they spent their lives paying into. At the same time, I am making the Social Security Administration more efficient, more responsive, and more effective than ever before -- reducing wait times and delivering the payments the American people worked hard to earn. I am also proudly restoring strong border security policies to ensure that Medicare and Social Security are preserved for the citizens who paid into them -- not abused by illegal aliens who have no right to be here. 

 On this 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act, we recognize the countless contributions of every American senior who has invested their time, talent, and resources into our Nation's future. On this momentous milestone, we recommit to strengthening our retirement system, protecting programs like Social Security and Medicare against fraud and abuse, and ensuring that every future generation of American citizens has the income security they need and earned. 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 14, 2025, as the 90th Anniversary of the Social Security Act. 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourteenth day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth. 

DONALD J. TRUMP

Commissioner Remains In A Self-Congratulatory Mood

 

The Counter-Argument

          Government Executive goes through the counter-arguments against the letter that Commissioner Bisignano wrote to Senator Warren claiming that service is rapidly improving at Social Security. 

     I deal with Social Security. I know things aren’t going well and the future looks grim. Service is currently improving in some ways and worsening in others. The  only reason service isn’t worse is the generous use of overtime. I expect there will be significantly less OT in the next fiscal year. 

     I know the agency has a huge problem with what I call the “Now now, not later, not ever” backlog, cases that present complications that take time to sort out, time that just doesn’t exist now. The employees are sorting out the easy cases first to create stats. The complex cases aren’t worked and under current circumstances they’re never going to be worked. They just keep piling up. I don’t think anyone is even counting them. I’m an attorney. Of course I raise complications. That’s my job. I know when the workers compensation offset is wrong. I know to ask for a protective filing date based upon a prior claim when the agency took an SSI only claim when they should have also taken a Disabled Adult Child claim. I know to point out that the agency missed a date first insured issue. I’m not the only one. Social Security employees themselves spot many of these things but have no time to act on them.

Smiles All Around

      Social Security’s Commissioner recently visited an agency field office in Staten Island, NY. The Commissioner talked about this visit on a new appearance on Fox News.

Can We Ever Step Back From This?

      Commissioner Bisignano has replied to the recent letter sent to him by Senator Warren. As you might guess Bisignano’s letter bristles with vicious partisanship. Sure, Warren’s letter was accusatory but public servants are not allowed to respond by escalating the situation. At least they weren’t until this Administration. Nothing like this would have been imaginable at any other time in the 90 year history of the Social Security Administration or any other agency.