Social Security Doing A Poor Job Of Resolving Critical Issues

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

Objective
To determine whether employees submitted and processed Manager-to-Manager (M2M) requests in accordance with Social Security Administration (SSA) policy.

Background
When a field office (FO), processing center (PC), or teleservice center employee identifies a critical issue for a beneficiary that requires another office’s action, managers can expedite action for the beneficiary by initiating an M2M request. Managers should only use M2M for high priority requests, such as beneficiaries who have terminal illnesses; made homicidal, suicidal, or potentially violent behavior threats; or are in dire need situations, such as facing eviction or homelessness.

Given the critical nature of M2M requests, FO and PC employees must address them within 5-business days or provide an interim reply to the requesting manager explaining the delay.
We reviewed a random sample of 100 M2M requests: 50 in a “resolved” status from June 1, 2021 through June 1, 2023 and 50 in a “pending” status as of June 1, 2023.

Results
SSA employees generally submitted M2M requests according to SSA policy; however, they did not always follow policy when they processed M2M requests. Of the 100 M2M requests we sampled, FO and PC employees did not process 57 requests according to policy.

• For 48 requests, FO and PC employees did not process them timely, resulting in delays in employees addressing critical issues and beneficiaries waiting weeks or months to receive the benefits they were due. 
  

• For 9 requests, PC employees placed them in a “resolved” status in the M2M application before completing all necessary actions to address the requests.
  

SSA managers provided reasons for delays, and we identified control weaknesses that contributed to delays, such as: (1) case complexity; (2) insufficient communication between offices, including no notifications in the M2M application when employees take action on requests; and (3) the absence of controls that prevent employees from prematurely closing M2M requests.  ...

    This is the sort of thing that drives me and other Social Security attorneys crazy We can't get problems resolved.

Trump Orders End To Treasury Issued Paper Checks

     I missed this one. Last week Trump ordered an end to Treasury issued paper checks as of September 30 of this year. 

    I think it's better than 95% of Social Security claimants who receive their benefits by direct deposit now but there are those who still need paper checks. One important group who still need paper checks are claimants who have lacked the funds to keep a bank account open while they wait months and years for their Social Security disability claims to be approved. They're only too happy to receive their payments by direct deposits once they have money to put in an account but not for that first check or two.

    Yes, I know there are benefit cards but the fees on those are ridiculous. More important, most folks still have a bank account when they file their Social Security disability claim but later have to close the bank account because they're broke so they won't be set up for a benefit card. 

    We'll see how this plays out. In theory, they aren't supposed to be paper checks even now but circumstances on the ground don't match up with what armchair theorists think possible. A little leeway is needed.

“Fraudsters”?

      Trump’s Commerce Secretary says that if Social Security payments don’t get paid that the ones who would complain the most are “fraudsters.”

O’Malley Predicts Benefits Interruption

      From CNBC:

Social Security has never missed a benefit payment since the program first began sending individuals monthly benefits more than eight decades ago.

But the recent actions at the U.S. Social Security Administration by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are putting monthly benefit checks for more than 72.5 million Americans at risk, former commissioner and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told CNBC.com.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”

     For the record, I’m pretty sure that O’Malley is wrong on the threat of interrupted benefits. Social Security does not initiate payment of benefits nor does it even maintain the database of those who should be paid. The Department of the Treasury does that. Social Security just gives Treasury new info — people to be added or subtracted from the list.  Treasury does the rest. So unless Treasury is itself terribly affected they will continue to make the payments. It’s just that they may be making less accurate payments including, ironically, paying some dead people who should have been cut off benefits.

Implementation Of WEP/GPO Elimination

     I've sorta asked the question before but never received what I thought was a definitive answer. To what extent will the elimination of WEP/GPO require manual recomputations? How much of this can be done through IT? These are important questions.

    If there will be manual recomputations, I'm going to be upset if they take priority over Social Security straightening out my clients' windfall offsets and workers compensation offsets and other such routine issues. The WEP/GPO people can take their turn in line like everybody else. If it takes six months or longer, and it will if these folks aren't granted priority, welcome to the reality of what the Social Security Administration is today.

SSA In The Middle

      From WKBN:

Some Ohio seniors say they are getting their Social Security payments garnished for COVID-19 Small Business Administration (SBA) loans they say they did not take out. 

Congressman Michael Rulli, R-6th District, is looking into the problem since he has learned of at least four cases of this happening to seniors in his district. His team said they are looking into these individual cases and have an issue with the SBA putting the burden of proof on seniors instead of the SBA, who Rulli accuses of having a “lackluster handling” of identity theft with the program.

Rulli said one message to his office involved a constituent who said that two SBA loans were fraudulently taken out in their name in 2021. That person said they provided SBA with the documents they requested, such as a police report and identification, in August 2024 and has yet to receive a response. …

     I don’t know what the process is like at SBA but there’s no way to contest this sort of thing at Social Security. 

Why Change?

     A tweet from Social Security:

Starting October 2024, SSI check recipients will receive their SSI checks in a WHITE envelope instead of a BLUE envelope. It’s quick and easy to get your payments electronically. ...

     Yes, there are still SSI claimants receiving paper checks. Unfortunately, they are, on the whole, a group of people who can be confused by small things.

What About The "Third Signature" Problem At The Payment Centers?

     Yesterday, we heard that Social Security was increasing the amounts of SSI benefits that could be authorized by appropriate employees at agency field offices without approval from a supervisor. This cuts down on the number of times that a "second signature" is required before a payment can go out. That helps but I think the bigger problem has been with Disability Insurance Benefits and other benefits under Title II of the Social Security Act. Individual benefits authorizers at the Title II payment centers can only approve so much without obtaining a "second signature" and if the amount goes even higher a "third signature" is required and that can take several months. They never announce these limits but I think the "third signature" threshold has been something like $50,000. A claimant with a high Primary Insurance Amount can get up to this limit with only a little over a year of back benefits. Is something being done about the Title II problem? The situation with the "third signature" cases is terrible. With inflation and higher agency backlogs there are more of the "third signature" cases. These cause severe backlogs. If you're going to do something about the SSI cases you certainly ought to do something about the Title II cases.

SSA Trying To Improve Payment Of Back SSI Benefits

     From a Social Security blog:

... Underpayments, typically back payments from the time of applying for SSI to the date the application is approved, represent money we owe for months past. People waiting on approval of SSI can experience economic insecurity while they wait for a decision.

In fiscal year 2024, our agency prioritized addressing the barriers that prevent timely payment of underpayments, not a large share of the total payments we administer under the SSI program (less than 1% annually). Overall, the SSI program has released $901 million in underpayments as of June 2024, which includes $209.1 million of our most complex and aged underpayments to roughly 81,000 people, who count on SSI as a vital lifeline. We are committed to finding solutions to challenges, such as peer reviews and installment and dedicated account processes, that have hindered timely payments.

 This year we updated a policy that required underpayments over $5,000 to be reviewed by another employee – a peer review – before we released the underpayment. In March 2024, we increased the amount from $5,000 to $15,000. Underpayments less than $15,000 can now be released without peer review. This policy change means the time it takes for SSI recipients to receive their first installment is now dramatically reduced. ...

    I wish I could say that I'm seeing improvement in this situation but I'm not. I've got a ton of backed up SSI cases awaiting payment and I see little movement. If your case gets even the least bit off the tracks, it's almost impossible to get it back on the tracks. We can't get the field offices to answer the phone. When they do answer the phone, we tell them about the problem but then nothing happens. It's a frustrating situation for us but horrific for the claimants. I'm sure it's discouraging for Social Security employees as well.

I Thought That Job One At The Payment Centers Was To Pay People

     From Reducing Processing Centers’ Pending Actions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

...  SSA met its annual PC [Payment Center] pending actions performance measure goal in 4 of the 6 FYs [Fiscal Years] between FY 2018 through 2023. SSA reported it did not meet its goals in the remaining 2 FYs because of unexpected staff reductions, increased workloads, and less than expected overtime funding it would have used to pay employees to process more PC pending actions.

Although SSA achieved its PC pending actions performance goals in 4 of the last 6 FYs, there was no overall reduction in PC pending actions over those 6 years. In fact, the PC pending actions backlog increased from 3.2 million in FY 2018 to 4.6 million in FY 2023. As the backlog grows, many PC pending actions remain unresolved for long periods of time. From a sample of 139 pending actions, 102 (73 percent) were pending for 300 days or more, with 60 of the 102 pending for 500 days or more.

Delays in processing PC pending actions can lead to higher improper payments, which increased some beneficiaries’ financial burden as they waited longer for underpayments or were charged with increased overpayment amounts. If SSA resolved the PC pending actions we reviewed at the earliest possible instance, we estimate it would have determined approximately 528,000 beneficiaries were improperly paid approximately $534 million. After the pending actions were not processed for 12 months, the improper payment amount for those same beneficiaries rose to approximately $756 million. By the time of our review, many of the PC pending actions had been pending for longer than 12 months, and the improper payment amount had increased to approximately $1.1 billion.

    Notice that it didn't seem to bother OIG that the payment centers were frequently failing to pay benefits for long periods of time. The only thing they seemed to have been concerned about was an increase in overpayments. This in a nutshell is the OIG outlook on the Social Security world -- It doesn't matter when or if you pay claimants what they're due; the only thing that counts is that you not overpay them. That outlook is a prescription for disaster for claimants.

Some Help On SSI Payment Backlogs

    From Emergency Message EM-24009:

... Since May of 1992, a prepayment review is required for any SSI case (initial or post eligibility), if an underpayment (UP) of $5,000 or more is due through the month prior to the current computation month (CCM) as per SI 02101.025 - Basic Requirements of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Underpayment (UP) Review (ssa.gov). Effective 03/16/2024, the amount of an SSI underpayment that requires a prepayment review will increase from $5,000 to $15,000. ...

    This should help reduce the SSI workloads a bit. The SSI effectuation backlogs are a major problem.

    I wonder whether something like this is planned for the Title II payment centers. Certainly the larger payments are a source of major delay. If you've been a high wage earner you could be looking at many months of delay before you're paid your back benefits. Would they announce that sort of change? Emergency messages generally don't concern truly emergent matters. They concern matters the agency believes are important -- that they want the public to be aware of. The agency isn't all that consistent in what it announces via EMs.

SSAB Study On Effectuation Of Disability Benefits

     The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) has done a study on Effectuation of Disability Benefits. It shows that there have been major increases in the time it takes to effectuate disability benefits, particularly SSI benefits. These delays are cruel. The claimant has already been found disabled. He or she is poor enough to qualify for SSI yet must wait many months to receive their benefits. That's wrong.

    Below are a couple of charts from the report showing what has happened. Note that the SSAB couldn't obtain good data from Social Security. They had to rely upon data from a large non-attorney representative group. That tells you that this hasn't been enough of a priority at Social Security to even collect good data on it. In addition to giving us an idea of the scope of the problem, the data also gives us an idea of the size of that non-attorney representative group.

A $500,000 Underpayment?

    From Newsweek:

A Kentucky woman said she is owed more than $500,000 after the Social Security Administration began underpaying her in the 1990s.

Wyonia Butler, 65, worked as a nurse in the 1990s, but at the young age of 32, she was injured on the job and wound up unable to work. ...

While Butler said she initially received workers' compensation, the payments ceased after just seven months. ...

In June of 1997, Butler received a letter saying she would get only 80 percent of her earnings due to the workers' compensation, despite the payments having stopped. That totaled $1,620 taken out of her benefits, which has easily surpassed $500,000 in lost money today.

While Butler immediately went to correct the error, confirming that she did not receive any workers' compensation anymore, the past 27 years have left her without answers and a heavy hit to her financial situation. ...

She initially received a letter saying they needed to secure more information and she needed to complete a few forms. She mailed them out and followed up but was told the forms were in backlog. The SSA representatives she spoke to said they weren't sure why her account still said she receives workers' compensation. ...

"I did as I was asked," Butler said. "However, to this date, it's never been done or addressed. They are still withholding $1,625 out of my check every month. I called, of course, and was told each time to be patient, it's being worked up."

After five years of failing to get answers, Butler said she stopped. It was affecting her health, but 27 years later, she still is unsure where a half-million dollars is and why it's been withheld from her. ...

In the meantime, Butler said she has been deprived of at least $500,000 in payments and lost her farm. ...

"I should have continued every day until I got an answer," Butler said. "I should have called more. Due to health reasons, I had to stop. I did call last year and this year. The line just rings and rings."

She received a denial of reconsideration after five months despite having immediately corrected the Social Security error. ...

    What happened here? I think the most likely explanation is that Ms. Butler was receiving her full, unreduced benefits. She thought her payment was reduced by the workers compensation offset but she was just confused about how much she was owed each month. She was certainly confused about what that 80% that she heard something about meant. It's complicated but while 80% is part of the workers compensation offset, it doesn't mean that there's an 80% reduction. The actual reduction could be more or less than that. Even though Ms. Butler seems confused -- as well she should be since this is all so complicated -- there is the real possibility that she has been underpaid all these years. Social Security has a hard time administering the complex workers compensation offset. I don't think that Social Security would deny that they make a lot of workers compensation offset mistakes but 27 years of mistakes is at the extreme end of what would be imaginable.

    If I were representing her, I'd like to see that reconsideration determination she received and I'd like to know what she did after receiving it. I'd like to see any other paperwork she has. Was there a settlement of her workers compensation case with a lump sum benefit payment? Was this paid by an annuity? Did her benefit payments change when she turned 62? If it did, that would suggest that the agency was still applying the workers compensation offset until then. I'm not going to explain why age 62 matters other than to say that I'm talking about the RIB-DIB election. If you don't know what the RIB-DIB election is, you don't know enough to be commenting on any of this.

Equite Action Plan Report

     The Social Security Administration has recently issued its Equity Action Plan: 2023 Update. It sounds like they're about a year behind in getting this out. It's full of vague, largely unmeasurable goals. Look at it yourself but what I've pulled  out below is all the content that I can find that seems vaguely interesting to me, at least:

• ... In FY 2023, to restore SSI applications closer to pre-pandemic levels, we launched a new SSI “Basic Needs” campaign in support of our FYs 2022-2023 Agency Priority Goal (APG) to increase SSI applications nationwide by 15 percent and increase applications from underserved communities by 25 percent, 1,758,656 and 127,749 applications, respectively. We have seen an increase in the overall number of SSI applications, nationally and in underserved communities. Since the campaign launched:

a. Our digital marketing tactics generated 1.81 million referrals from our SSI website to the online SSI Protective Filing tool, yielding 345,000 SSI applications through September 3, 2023. The tool allows individuals and third-party helpers to establish a protective filing10 online and request an appointment to file for benefits.

b. Our marketing generated more than 1.9 billion impressions across all tactics and over 2.7 million website visits.

c. Through September 29, 2023, we exceeded our APG target for SSI applications in underserved communities relative to the 2021 baseline by receiving nearly 135,000 applications. ...


• In May 2023, we established the Office of Transformation (OT), which includes our Customer Experience (CX) team. The OT’s mission is to facilitate the most critical business enhancements that serve the public and support our frontline employees. ...
• As of August 23, 2023, there were about 220,000 pending [SSI] underpayments, of which more than 140,000 underpayments (with corresponding alerts) have been pending for a year or more or are priority cases. ...
  

    I can be critical of the vagueness of the report but in an organization as large as the Social Security Administration a 1% improvement in service which might seem trivial to me could still improve the lives of a not insignificant number of people. We'd all love to see transformative changes but with current levels of funding all that's possible are the tiniest baby steps.

Now Now. Not Later. Not Ever.

 

    When we're rushed, we cut corners and we make more mistakes than usual. Social Security employees are rushed. They're cutting corners. They're making lots of mistakes. They're putting off difficult work. Even in the best of times, there are some things which didn't get done properly to begin with that need to be corrected but in these terrible times there are many, many of these.

    The stress on Social Security employees isn't going away. They will remain overburdened indefinitely. My firm asks them to straighten out their mistakes but they don't have time to do it. It's getting to the point that I think the work isn't going to get done now. It's not going to get done later. It's never going to get done, at least not in the foreseeable future. 

    What kinds of mistakes or omissions am I seeing? Let me list a few:

• Claimant's monthly benefits are authorized but nothing is done about paying the back benefits or attorney fees.
• Claimant receives a small payment that is apparently their back benefits but it seems far too low. No award certificate is issued so the claimant and attorney can't figure out whether there has been a mistake.
• There's what I call a phantom windfall offset. Claimant filed an SSI claim which was quickly denied on income or resources. When the Title II claim is approved, no back benefits are paid because they're waiting on payment of the SSI benefits so they can do the windfall offset. Meanwhile, no back benefits or attorney fees are paid.
  
• A field office employee makes one telephone call to a claimant about implementing SSI benefits. They can't leave a message so they immediately deny the claim for failure to cooperate. (They're supposed to make repeated efforts to contact the claimant and those who may be able to help, such as the claimant's attorney but that takes time, so they just get the claim off their desk by denying it.)
• A fee petition is approved. That's a little unusual so it doesn't get paid.

    This is a depressing, discouraging situation for an attorney like me who wants to help his clients and who wants to receive the fees he's entitled to for helping them.

    Social Security is undergoing enormous stress. I think it's fair to say it's falling apart. Asking employees to work harder isn't going to solve the problem. The systems updates and IT changes the agency is making hardly help at all. Making employees come into the office every day would make little or no difference. The only solution is a lot more employees, like 10,000 more, but that might cost another billion dollars or so a year so it's out of the question now.

    I don't think the message is getting through to the public or members of Congress about just how bad things are.

    My only suggestion is that the agency should start closing many small field offices, which will mostly be in areas represented in Congress by Republicans. The administration needs to turn a deaf ear to the howls of protest from Republican members of Congress. You get the service you pay for. What's going on now is unsustainable.

Direct Express Problems

     The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report on the Direct Express Debit Card program. Claimants who don't have a financial account into which benefits can be deposited can receive their money through a Comerica Bank debit card. The Comerica deal, which is with the Department of the Treasury, not Social Security, has been criticized because of high fees to benefits recipients and because people complained that they were assigned a debit card without asking for one. The OIG report found that there were some Social recipients complaining about receiving a debit card without asking for one. The OIG report also found that there has been a fair amount of money returned to Social Security by Comerica because of unfinished enrollments and that Social Security has been slow in making sure the claimants involved received their money. OIG found 39 cases where a claimant had been owed over $100,000.

I Guess The Name Is OK But It’s All Really Weird

      From what I think is a press release:

Charlie, a neobank for the 62-plus demographic, is looking to solve pain points facing retirees and soon-to-be-retirees.

The fintech, which launched last week, allows account holders to withdraw their Social Security benefits up to four weeks early. The free service is available to account holders who link their Social Security direct deposit to their Charlie deposit account, said Kevin Nazemi, the fintech’s co-founder and CEO. …

     I don’t understand any of this. What’s a “neobank”? What’s a “fintech”? A financial institution named “Charlie”? How can they afford to give people money weeks prior to its actual arrival? What’s the catch?

Seems Almost Quaint

     For most of the history of Social Security, all monthly payments of benefits came out on the third of each month. That changed in 1997 so that the Title II payments come out on three dates each month. The date you receive your payment depends upon the day of the month upon which you were born. 

    The Social Security Administration's statement at the time this change was made gives an insight into the level of service that was then prevalent at the agency. This is from a notice published by Social Security in the Federal Register on February 11, 1997 (emphasis added):

SSA’s current practice of paying 47 million beneficiaries within the first 3 days of each month results in a large surge of work during the first week of each month. This surge includes a large number of visitors to field offices and calls to our toll-free 800 number to report nonreceipt of a check, question the amount paid, or ask about other payment-related issues. Approximately 9 percent of all calls during check week concern nonreceipt, compared to 3 percent during the rest of the month. As an example of the surge that occurs around the current payment days, on April 3, 1995, 1,091,282 calls were placed to SSA’s 800 number. On April 14, 1995, the number of calls placed to our 800 number decreased to 229,022. It is important to beneficiaries and customers to be able to reach SSA with fewer busy signals, and we have pledged to enable callers to get through to the 800 number within 5 minutes of their original attempt. However, in fiscal year (FY) 1994, during peak periods, customers encountered busy signals on SSA’s 800 number 40–63 percent of the time and had to wait more than 5 minutes to get through about 30 percent of the time. ...

 Our goal is for our customers to have minimal waits for service when visiting a Social Security field office. Today, SSA does not always meet this goal. In FY 1994 there were 24 million visitors to our field offices. While the average wait during check week for individuals with an appointment was 8 minutes, some individuals with appointments had to wait over 2 hours. Thirty-two percent of the visitors to our offices without appointments in FY 1994 (typically people who have questions related to their payments or who want to report payment delivery problems) had to wait more than 30 minutes after arriving to be served. The average wait during check week for individuals without appointments was 16 minutes, although some individuals without appointments had to wait over 3 hours. ...

    The agency already felt it was under customer service stress way back in 1997 but the level of stress was vastly less than it is now. Adequate service has been defined downward dramatically since then.

Why Not Look At Both Sides?

     From Incorrect Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance Benefit Payment Computations that Resulted in Overpayments, an audit report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

... SSA makes incorrect benefit computations when employees enter the wrong information into SSA’s systems or incorrectly calculate benefits. Benefits are incorrectly computed when employees or systems base calculations on inaccurate information. When SSA detects an error or obtains accurate information, it corrects the benefits and establishes an overpayment or issues an underpayment. We focused our review on overpayments. ...

We estimate SSA could have avoided approximately 73,000 overpayments totaling more than $368 million if it had effective controls over benefit-computation accuracy. SSA’s controls did not always ensure the Agency calculated benefits accurately. ...

    OK, those overpayments aren't good but what about the other side of the coin. Wasn't Social Security as likely to underpay claimants as overpay them? How many claimants were underpaid and by how much? Isn't that as least as important?

    This report is a microcosm of OIG's priorities and not just under the current Inspector General -- an intense focus on overpayments with only a limited interest in underpayments, which are at least as big a problem.

Help Please

      For some time now I've been posting the Caseload Analysis Report issued by Social Security's Office of Hearings Operations (OHO). To their credit, OHO has been voluntarily releasing it. 

    I'm sure that other Social Security components produce similar reports. I'd like to see some of them. I can request them under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) but it would help if I knew what the reports are called. I'd be interested in the names of the operational reports for the Disability Determination Services (State Agency Operations Report?), Field Offices, Teleservice Centers and Payment Centers. The names of the reports can't be some closely held secret. Can anyone help me with just the names of the reports?

    It's hard to imagine any harm to the agency in the public having a better idea of the agency's operations. It might be of help in obtaining an adequate operating budget.