Senate Finance Committe Hearing Today

     The Senate Finance Committee is holding a hearing at 10:00 today (June 18) on Work and Social Security Disability Benefits: Addressing Challenges and Creating Opportunities. You can watch it online. Here's the witness list:

• William R. Morton, Analyst, Income Security, Congressional Research Service
• Susan B. Wilschke,  Associate Commissioner, Office of Research, Demonstration, and Employment Support, Social Security Administration
• Erin Godtland, Assistant Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security, United States Government Accountability Office
• Katherine Zuleger, President, Chicago Social Security Management Association Executive Committee Member, National Council of Social Security Management Association
  

A Good Start

    From a press release:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), today introduced legislation to remove a Social Security work disincentive for Americans with disabilities. ...

If an adult has a severe medical condition that began before age 22, they may be eligible for a Social Security benefit called the Disabled Adult Child (DAC) benefit. Their benefits are based on their parent’s Social Security earnings, in the same way that benefits of a child under age 18 would be. However, under current law some of these young adults fear that if they try to work they will lose future DAC benefits, which are often higher than any benefit they may qualify on their own. This fear inhibits the ability of Americans with disabilities to explore their ability to work as they transition to adult life.

The Work Without Worry Act promotes financial security by ensuring that any earnings from work – no matter how much – will not prevent an individual from receiving a Social Security DAC benefit from their parent’s work history if they have an eligible medical condition that began before age 22. ...

This change is estimated to improve the lives of nearly 6,000 individuals with disabilities over the next 10 years and would have no significant effect on the Social Security Trust Funds. ...

     Now, how about we do something about the marriage penalty that cuts off DAC if a recipient marries.

And Another One Bites The Dust

     From David Weaver writing for The Hill:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently released the results of a major study on disability and work patterns. ...

The new study, called the Supported Employment Demonstration, sought to determine whether service interventions could promote success in the labor market for younger adults (that is, under the age of 50) who suffer from mental impairments.

Individuals in the treatment groups received employment support integrated with behavioral health services. These services and supports, known as the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model, focuses on rapid job placement and eliminating barriers to work. The control group received no direct services or supports.

An important feature of the Supported Employment Demonstration is that it focused on individuals who were denied Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability benefits. Thus, the experiences of the control group illuminate the likely outcomes of proposals by Republican leaders and conservative economists that would shrink the reach of such programs. ...

In the third year of the study, the average monthly earnings of individuals in the control group were only $395 — not nearly enough to ward off extreme hardship. ...

Conservatives often emphasize the importance of financial disincentives of disability programs. But, gold-standard random-assignment demonstrations by SSA have not found any effect on earnings from financial incentives embedded in the benefit rules. Why? Because the fundamental problem facing disability applicants stems from the way in which severe health problems, directly and indirectly, interfere with every aspect of employment. ...

Average monthly earnings among those who received employment support and behavioral health services were 40-50 percent higher than for those who received no services — further evidence that individuals with severe health problems need services and support to have some success in the labor market. ...

To be sure, the monthly average earnings of those who received services in the Supported Employment Demonstration were still modest, ranging from $553 to $590. ...

In the idealized view, only full-time work at high levels of earnings is considered a successful outcome for disabled persons. A rethink of disability and work would allow for programs, policy and communications to support diverse work patterns among persons with disabilities, including part-time work, episodic work and less formal work, including volunteer. ...

    The problem with Mr. Weaver's position, which he acknowledges, is that policymakers are only interested in programs that knock people off benefits, not programs that help them earn a little more while staying on benefits. By this standard, this study was a near complete failure, just as every other study of work incentives and work assistance programs has been a near complete failure. Even those whose disability claims are denied are too sick to work on a regular basis. They really are sick. The standards to get benefits really are difficult to meet. You can't make rational decisions about Social Security disability benefits until you realize just how harsh these programs are. One of the signs that policymakers don't realize how harsh these programs are has been the endless adoption of new work incentives and the endless funding of demonstration programs designed to put disability claimants back to work. None of it can work. The claimants are just too damn sick to benefit from these efforts in any significant number.

The Dubious Benefits Of Ticket To Work

     From Effects of the Ticket to Work Program: Return on Investment and Overall Assessment of Outcomes Versus Design by Paul O'Leary and Emily Roessel:

The Ticket to Work (TTW) program was established by 1999 legislation to expand access to vocational rehabilitation services for beneficiaries of Social Security Administration (SSA) disability benefit programs. We evaluate TTW and compare its outcomes with the intentions of its authorizing legislation. We also compare the program's costs with the benefit savings resulting from the reemployment of successful program participants. We analyze unadjusted descriptive statistics, then consider potential participation bias among individuals who received employment services by devising an econometric analysis that accounts for the seriousness of a participant's interest in work. We find that TTW improved employment outcomes and generated net benefit savings to SSA for many employment-service clients, but the savings did not fully offset program costs. However, these estimates should be regarded as lower bounds of TTW's positive effects because they do not account for higher service needs of TTW program participants. ...

Few People Cut Off Disability Benefits Can Work Enough To Support Themselves

     From Outcomes Following Termination of Social Security Disability Insurance by Michael T. Anderson, Monica Farid, Serge Lukashanets, Denise Hoffman and Kai Filion:

...  The paper found the following:

• Among people whose benefits terminated due to medical improvement from 2005 to 2014, 16 percent of former DI-only beneficiaries and 14 percent of former concurrent beneficiaries returned to DI within five years.
• Among people whose benefits terminated due to work from 2005 to 2014, 32 percent of former DI-only beneficiaries and 50 percent of former concurrent beneficiaries returned to DI within five years.
• Fewer than half of former beneficiaries whose benefits terminated due to medical improvement had average post-termination earnings above the poverty threshold. Those whose benefits terminated due to work were more likely to have post-termination earnings above the poverty threshold than those whose termination was due to medical improvement.
• Age and certain diagnoses were strongly associated with earnings below the poverty threshold and return to disability entitlement, especially schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, and intellectual disabilities. ...

    I think the attitude of many people can be summarized as "It's easy to get on Social Security disability. Except for the 'truly disabled' those drawing benefits are mostly lazy or just wusses who don't have the courage to overcome their disabilities and work. I'd never let that happen to me."  That's the attitude among many of my clients who are themselves trying to get on Social Security disability benefits. Of course, they know themselves to be "truly disabled" without realizing that prior to becoming disabled they would have naively judged someone with their health problems to not be "truly disabled" because they didn't look sick enough. Often my clients have unrealistic expectations of their own ability to recover or overcome their disabilities and delay filing claims for disability benefits for years, until they become destitute, and then feel guilty about going ahead with a disability claim when they finally do.

    This study demonstrates that it's damned difficult to get on Social Security benefits. Those who do should be recognized as "truly disabled." It should be acknowledged that they have little hope of ever again supporting themselves with work. However, we see proposal after proposal that purport to demonstrate a path for getting disability benefits recipients can be returned to work.

A System That Trips Up 82% Of Those Who Attempt To Navigate It Is A Failed System

    From Work Overpayments Among New Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries, a just released study by Denise Hoffman, Monica Farid, Serge Lukashanets, Michael T. Anderson, and John T. Jones:

This paper studies the experiences of the 2008 cohort of first-time Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries who were at risk of overpayment because they engaged in substantial gainful activity (SGA) after completing the trial work period and grace period (work incentives allowing beneficiaries to test work). ...

The paper found the following:

• Among a sample of 31,520 2008 first-time Social Security Disability Insurance awardees at risk of a work-related overpayment, 82 percent (25,846) were overpaid in the first 10 years after award.
• Among those overpaid within 10 years of award, half of all overpayments began in the first four years after award.
• Nearly all overpayments (89 percent) began in the first month of SGA after exhausting trial work period and grace period months. ...

What A Disaster!

     From Promoting Opportunity Demonstration: Final Evaluation Report, submitted to Social Security by Mathematica, a contractor:

...  POD [Promoting Opportunity Demonstration] was a randomized controlled trial that included two treatments of a benefit offset. The two treatment groups had the same benefit offset but different termination rules. Treatment group 1 (T1) did not face termination, but treatment group 2 (T2) faced termination after 12 consecutive months of earnings above the full offset amount (the point at which benefits were reduced to zero). ...

The key features of POD implementation included benefits counseling services and support for processing earnings adjustments, led by the implementation team, and recruitment, led by the evaluation team. ...

Approximately 30 percent of treatment group members used the POD benefit offset, with a median monthly offset amount of $351. More than 80 percent of offset users experienced a work-related overpayment or underpayment, requiring a retroactive adjustment to reconcile the difference. ...

We did not observe any statistically significant differences in outcomes between the two treatment groups for overall offset usage or the impact estimates for the primary outcomes. ...

There were limited statistically significant differences in observed outcomes for the POD treatment and control groups. There were impacts on one primary outcome (annualized SGA) and several other employment-related measures. For example, we found positive impacts on job search and use of Vocational Rehabilitation services, which might contribute to longer-term outcomes. These impacts were notable because they indicate that impacts could still emerge beyond the two-year evaluation window. ...

POD had positive net benefits for beneficiaries and net costs to SSA. The net benefits for beneficiaries were driven by increases in earnings and fringe benefits, and SSDI benefit amounts. The new costs were driven primarily by the increased benefit payments and costs for counseling services. ...

    Even with counseling, 80% of those using the offset ended up with an overpayment or underpayment! The experiment had only a limited effect on outcomes and ended up costing more money than it saved! Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

    Why can't policymakers admit the obvious? Social Security disability recipients are, for the most part, really, really sick. Everything under the sun has been tried to get them back to jobs. Nothing has worked. Nothing. The work incentive schemes just get more difficult and expensive to administer. They end up with messy results for the disability recipients who do attempt to return to work because the offsets are too complicated The schemes always end up costing more money than they save. There's no possible work incentives that will get any significant number of disability recipients back to work because they're too sick. 

    Crappy experiments like this are likely to go on forever because policymakers are blinded by their own preconceptions that it's easy to get on Social Security disability benefits and that a lot of disability recipients could work if given the right incentives. They don't bother to study the pathetic history of work incentive failure. They get sold on new schemes by contractors like Mathematica who end up getting paid even though their schemes never work. Even after this disaster this 406 page report ends with ideas for new schemes that could be tried!

Social Security Seeks Return To Work Ideas

      From a notice that the Social Security Administration is posting in the Federal Register tomorrow: 

... Through this notice, we are soliciting suggestions for potential policy changes and services related to supporting DI [Disability Insurance] beneficiaries, SSI recipients, and disability program applicants in their efforts to return to, remaining in, or enter the labor force. We are also soliciting suggestions for other potential demonstrations. Responses to this request may inform our decisions about future demonstrations and how to design such projects. ...

Work Incentive Experiment Ended

      From an Emergency Message:

... This emergency message (EM) provides notification for field offices (FO), National 800 Number Network (N8NN), and processing service centers (PSC) that the Promoting Opportunity Demonstration (POD) will end for all participating beneficiaries on 06/30/2021. ... 

SSA began recruiting volunteers—who may be SSDI or concurrent beneficiaries—for the POD in January 2018. Recruitment continued through December 2018, resulting in a total enrollment count of 10,070 participants. The random assignment process placed POD participants into one of three groups: two treatment groups and one control group. Treatment group 1 and treatment group 2 members both received the $1 for $2 offset. Treatment group 2 members had their entitlement to benefits terminated if they experienced 12 consecutive months in full offset (that is, when their SSDI benefit is reduced to $0 for 12 consecutive months). Treatment group 1 members would not have their entitlement to benefits terminated even if they experienced 12 consecutive months in full offset. The control group did not receive the $1 for $2 offset. Control group member’s earnings were subject to current SSDI rules. ...

     No word on the results of this experiment although I think we'd have heard more about it if it had been a success. Really, how much success can one expect when you impose a 50% tax on gross earnings in addition to ordinary payroll taxes? There's just not much left for the worker. In any case, I don't think you could design an experiment that would work. You have to be so damned sick to get on Social Security disability benefits that we shouldn't be expecting any significant number of Social Security disability recipients to be returning to sustained work. The experiments are based on the fallacies that it's easy to get on Social Security disability benefits and that many on Social Security disability benefits get better over time.

     I'm not sure how this demonstration relates to the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND).  If I remember correctly that was pretty much the same thing except it was supposed to run for ten years. It won't work either.

Issuing A Directive

      A press release:

Today, House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman John B. Larson (D-CT) and Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny K. Davis (D-IL) sent a letter directing the U.S. Department of Labor to halt consideration of a proposed transfer of the Ticket to Work program from the Social Security Administration to the U.S. Department of Labor. The Ticket to Work program provides services to help Social Security and Supplemental Security Income disability beneficiaries who are attempting to return to work.

“In 1999, Congress placed the new Ticket to Work and Self-Sufficiency program (Ticket program) under the Social Security Administration (SSA), because of the close coordination between SSA and program participants, including beneficiaries and service providers, that is essential to the operation of the Ticket Program. Nothing has changed to warrant a transfer to the Department of Labor (DOL),” wrote Larson and Davis.

“By law, the Department of Labor does not administer the Ticket program,” continued Larson and Davis. “We do not intend to consider legislation to remove the administration of the Ticket program from SSA and place it at DOL. We therefore expect the Department to halt any further consideration of this inappropriate and detrimental proposal.”

Few Social Security Disability Recipients Are Aware Of Work Incentives

Click on image to view full size

From DI & SSI Program Participants: Characteristics & Employment, 2015, recently released by Social Security.

Buttigieg Social Security Disability Proposals

     Pete Buttigieg is the first Presidential candidate to issue detailed proposals to help disabled Americans. Here’s the section of his plan dealing with Social Security:

• Eliminate the “benefit cliff” for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) so benefits gradually phase out until recipients reach nearly $45,000 in annual earnings.
• Eliminate SSDI’s ineffective current work incentives.
• Reduce excessive wait times for SSDI and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) appeals cases.
• Enable SSDI participants to start receiving income benefits as soon as they are admitted to the program.
• Eliminate SSDI’s 24-month waiting period for Medicare coverage.
• Update critical SSI thresholds to allow people to receive greater assistance as costs of living rise.

Kotlikoff Interacts With The Real World And Is Shocked By Its Harshness

     Laurence Kotlikoff is a columnist on Social Security issues for Forbes. Mostly he writes about claiming strategies that almost no one uses and oddball rules that he finds outrageous. Mostly, I tune him out because I don't think he's writing about real world problems. If you're a Social Security professional and have read many of his columns I think you understand why. 

     As a welcome change, Kotlikoff is now writing about two problems from the real world. First, he's shocked to discover that Supplemental Security Income's (SSI's) resource limits are draconian. Second, he's shocked to discover that a claimant on Social Security disability benefits who tries to park his income below the agency's Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA) limits can easily end up with a large overpayment. I wish I was shocked by either of these situations but they are an everyday part of my work life. SSI recipients should never accumulate even modest sums of money because the rules are insanely out of date. Social Security disability recipients shouldn't try to park their income below SGA because they almost always screw it up and the consequences of a screw up can be severe.

     What gets me about Kotlikoff's column is that he's appealing to Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul to do something about these problems but Saul can't. I suppose he could recommend that Congress update the SSI income and resource limits but he can't change them unilaterally and Mitch McConnell won't be doing any favors for SSI recipients. Saul could try to increase the SGA limits but that takes changes in regulations which would require the approval of the Office of Management and Budget which is currently headed by a Director who isn't exactly sympathetic to disabled people. An increase in the SGA limits wouldn't solve the parking problem anyway. As a practical matter, there's nothing Saul can do. Kotlikoff ought to know that.

Can We Just Quit Wasting Money On Such UnPROMISING Research?

     The Social Security Administration, along with the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services have worked together to create a plan to help young people receiving Supplemental Security Income improve their lives and, more to the point, move off government benefits. This plan, called PROMISE for Promoting Readiness of Minors in SSI, was tested in six states. PROMISE has the following components:

• Formal partnerships between state agencies that provide the following services: vocational rehabilitation (VR) services, special education and related services, workforce development services, Medicaid services, income assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and services provided by federally funded state developmental disability and mental health services programs
• Case management to ensure that PROMISE services would be appropriately planned and coordinated, help participants navigate the broader service delivery system, and help with transition planning for post-school goals and services
• Benefits counseling and financial education for youth and their families on SSA work incentives, eligibility requirements of various programs, rules governing earnings and assets, and topics promoting families’ financial stability
• Career and work-based learning experiences, including paid and unpaid work experiences in an integrated setting while they were in high school
• Parent training and information in two areas: (1) the parents’ or guardians’ role in supporting and advocating for their youth to help them achieve their education and employment goals, and (2) resources for improving the education and employment outcomes of the parents or guardians and the economic self-sufficiency. ...

     Our old friend, the beltway bandit, Mathematica Policy Research, has done an evaluation of PROMISE. The bottom line is that PROMISE is quite unpromising. As the report says, "By 18 months after enrollment, none of the programs had a desirable impact on youth’s self-determination and expectations or youth’s reliance on Medicaid, nor on parents’ total income." 

     This sort of research is not harmless. This study cost $230 million. That money could have been better spent preventing further degradation of service at Social Security. 

     Can we just give up on the illusion that there's some crafty scheme that will put disabled people to work? We've tried these schemes for more than 50 years, often at great expense, and they never work. Never.

You Might Want To Do Something About This

     From Work-Related Overpayments to Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries: Prevalence and Descriptive Statistics by Denise Hoffman, Benjamin Fischer, John T. Jones, Andrew McGuirk, and Miriam Loewenberg, published in the Social Security Bulletin (emphasis added):

For decades, Social Security Administration (SSA) efforts to increase employment among Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries have been a focus of considerable interest among both policymakers and researchers. However, beneficiary work activity sometimes results in benefit overpayments, and research on the extent of those overpayments—and the characteristics of affected beneficiaries—has been relatively limited. ...

DI overpayments account for a substantial sum of money and create administrative and fiscal management challenges for SSA. Work-related overpayment amounts ranged from $831 million in fiscal year 2010 to $980 million in fiscal year 2012. ...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that overpayments and their aftermaths can be traumatic experiences for beneficiaries and may function as disincentives to work. ...

[W]e find that overpayments are probable among at-risk beneficiaries (of whom 71 percent were overpaid). The median duration of work-related overpayments was 9 months and the median amount they accrued was $9,282. Overpayments were most prevalent among traditionally disadvantaged or vulnerable populations, including beneficiaries who are black or Hispanic, those with low monthly DI benefit amounts, those for whom medical improvement is not expected, and those with less than a high school education, holding other characteristics equal. ...

     I don't know all of what should be done about this but, I guess, the first step would be to acknowledge that, in the main, this is a systemic problem rather than the fault of claimants trying to cheat. I think the second step would be to acknowledge that collection of these overpayments should not be the priority. The system is too complicated. We can't keep blaming the claimants for these overpayments. Most of these overpayments should be quickly waived if we want to avoid discouraging attempts to return to work. 

     Social Security's Inspector General, in particular, needs to give some serious thought to the pressure it puts on the agency to aggressively find and collect any and all overpayments.

BOND Experiment A Complete Failure

     While looking for something else, I happened upon a report on the BOND experiment. It was issued last October but Social Security made no effort to publicize it. Here's an excerpt explaining what BOND is or was and what the results have been:

Congress directed the Social Security Administration (SSA) to test alternative Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) work rules designed to increase the incentive for SSDI beneficiaries to work and reduce the total amount of SSDI benefits paid to beneficiaries. In response, SSA has undertaken the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND), a random assignment test of alternative SSDI program rules governing work and other supports. BOND tests a $1 for $2 benefit offset applied to annual earnings above the BOND Yearly Amount (BYA)—the annual equivalent of SSDI’s substantial gainful activity amount. As a result, beneficiaries in the treatment group are able to retain some of their monthly cash benefits while earning more than BYA. The benefit offset reduces yearly SSDI benefits by $1 in SSDI benefits for every $2 in annual earnings above BYA (in other words, reduces yearly SSDI benefits by half the amount that annual earnings exceed the BYA threshold). ...

The analysis finds no confirmatory evidence of an impact of the benefit offset on average earnings in either the nationally-representative Stage 1 or in the Stage 2 sample of volunteers. In contrast, the analysis finds confirmatory evidence that, relative to current law, the benefit offset policy increased the average amount of SSDI benefits due to beneficiaries over five years. In the nationally-representative Stage 1, the positive impact on SSDI benefits was $143 per year (or about $12 per month)—an increase of slightly more than 1 percent of the current-law average benefits. ... 

For the nationally representative Stage 1 sample, the benefit-cost analysis found a net social cost of the BOND offset. The very small estimated increases in earnings were not sufficient to offset the deadweight loss from increases in taxes needed to fund larger SSDI benefit payments. Distributional effects were much larger, with SSDI beneficiaries gaining income by receiving larger SSDI benefits and countervailing losses to the Disability Insurance Trust Fund. ...

     In case the verbiage confuses you, the result is clear.  BOND costs more than it saves. Social Security paid out more in benefits without inducing additional claimants to return to work or at least not enough of them to outweigh the additional benefits. BOND, just like all other efforts to induce Social Security disability recipients to return to work, is a failure. I think I understand why Social Security wasn't trumpeting this report.

     I think it's past time to consider the possibilities that Social Security disability recipients:

• Are generally quite sick
• Are generally getting sicker as they age -- very few ever improve
• Have little potential to return to work

SSI Work Incentives Not Working

     From the Social Security Administration:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) offers a set of work incentives for Supplemental Security income (SSI) beneficiaries. Work incentive employment supports help SSI recipients go to work by minimizing the risk of losing their SSI or Medicaid benefits (Social Security Administration, 2018). One such incentive, the Plan to Achieve Self-Support (PASS), allows approved individuals to set aside earned or unearned income and resources to achieve an employment goal. The money or resources set aside are excluded from SSI income and resource tests and can be used to pay for goods or services needed to reach the goal, such as education, vocational training, starting a business, or purchasing work-related equipment (Social Security Administration, 2017).  

The number of recipients enrolled nationally in any SSA work incentive program between 2000 and 2016 remains low and has been declining. In particular, the PASS incentive program has seen decreased enrollment in the last fifteen years - a 50% decrease from 2000 to 2016 in the number of individuals who enrolled. This is especially notable considering SSA reported providing benefits to 4,845,735 blind and disabled* SSI recipients aged 18-65 in 2016. Furthermore, there are only 692 PASS users enrolled nationwide, making it the least used incentive of those offered. Please refer to Table 1 for more details on three SSI work incentives. 

Despite SSAs investment in the Work Incentive Planning and Assistance (WIPA) program, SSI work incentives remain profoundly underutilized as a path towards employment for SSI recipients.

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Ticket To Work Not Working

     From the Washington Free Beacon:

The Social Security Administration has spent $3 billion on programs designed to incentivize disability recipients to go back to work over the past 16 years. So far, less than 3 percent of beneficiaries have signed up, with "no consistent evidence" the program has helped participants find a job. 

The inspector general for the agency released an audit last week calling for Congress to evaluate the "viability" of the programs 

including Ticket to Work and Self-Sufficiency (TTW) and Achieve Self-Support (PASS)."SSA has spent about $3 billion administering two ongoing congressionally mandated return-to-work programs and a time-limited demonstration project designed to determine whether a policy change would help beneficiaries return to work," the inspector general said. "However, these programs and demonstration project enticed a small percentage of disabled individuals to return to work." ...

Since it began in 2000, the TTW program has cost $2.8 billion and enrolled 1.2 million disabled welfare recipients, a participation rate of only 2.6 percent. Those beneficiaries have saved the government approximately $5.9 billion. For each beneficiary served, the government spent $2,300 through the program, as opposed to the average $5,000 benefits forgone. ...

      You might say that this shows that even though TTW is only minimally successful that it still more than pays for itself but the problem is that it is more than possible that the vast majority of those “helped” by TTW would have gone back to work on their own. To what extent are TTW providers helping people who wouldn’t otherwise get back to work and to what extend are TTW providers just profiting from people who don’t need their help? We just don’t know. Any advantage from TTW is, at best, unproven. The problem with all the efforts to get Social Security disability recipients back to work is that they are premised upon a deep seated belief that it’s easy to get on benefits. It’s not. It’s terribly difficult to get on disability benefits. As sick as people have to be to get on Social Security disability benefits, we shouldn’t expect many to go back to work.

71% Overpayment Rate

     From Work-Related Overpayments of Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries: Prevalence And Descriptive Statistics, a study by several researchers for the Mathematica Center for Studying Disability Policy:

Work-related overpayments occur when the Social Security Administration (SSA) issues a monthly benefit to which an individual is not entitled because of engagement in substantial gainful activity. ... 
We found that: 

• 1.9 percent of all DI [Disability Insurance] beneficiaries in our sample were overpaid due to work in one or more months during the three-year study period. 
• Among DI beneficiaries with sufficient earnings to put them at risk of a work-related overpayment, 71 percent were overpaid. 
• Work-related overpayments lasted for a median of nine months. 
• Work-related overpayments accrued to a median of over $9,000.

      71% of the time that a Social Security Disability Insurance Benefits recipient returns to work for long enough at enough pay that his or her benefits should be reduced those benefits aren't actually reduced and there's an overpayment of benefits? That's terrible. It's obvious that there are systemic problems. You can't just blame claimants for this high a rate of overpayments. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this situation but the incredible complexity of the rules applied in cases where beneficiaries return to work have to be a major part. I also think it's too difficult to report return to work.
     I'll make one simple suggestion which would probably help and it could be implemented without changing any laws. Send a yearly mailer to each person drawing disability benefits each January asking whether they have earned money in the preceding year. If they reply that they have, follow up with them to get the details. If they have worked but remain eligible for benefits at the time, send them quarterly mailers for at least the next couple of years and follow up on the responses. I'll admit that there's one huge problem with my suggestion. Social Security lacks the manpower to deal with the responses they would receive. I'll admit that it's also possible that it wouldn't be cost efficient since only 1.9% o benefits recipients are affected. Got any better ideas?

Legislation Passes

     From Think Advisor:

The House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security and Tax Policy passed on Wednesday the “Social Security Online Tools Innovation Act,” H.R. 3309, which requires the Social Security Administration to provide online tools to help individuals assess their disability benefits.

The bill, which was reported to the full House, requires the Social Security commissioner to make publicly available online tools allowing individuals that are eligible for disability benefits “to assess the impact of earnings on the individual’s eligibility for, and amount of, benefits received through federal and state benefit programs.”

House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson, R-Texas, announced the same day that he plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday to examine changes to the Social Security disability appeals process.

The hearing will examine recent and planned changes affecting the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals process, the metrics the SSA uses to evaluate process changes, and the progress the SSA has made to address the appeals backlog.

“Recently, the Social Security Administration made a major decision to change the disability appeals process in certain states that could have real-life consequences for Americans,” Johnson said in announcing the hearing. “A decision of this magnitude should be made by a Senate-confirmed commissioner, which we currently do not have. In the meantime, it is Congress’ duty to examine whether this change makes sense for disability claimants and taxpayers.”

     This piece addresses two issues. As to the first, here's the text of the bill, which I predict will have zero real world consequences:

Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Commissioner of Social Security shall make available through an individual’s account on the website of the Social Security Administration online tools to allow all individuals eligible for benefits based on disability under titles II and XVI of the Social Security Act to assess the impact of earnings on the individual’s eligibility for, and amount of, benefits received through Federal and State benefit programs.

      I have no idea why the Tax Policy Subcommittee would have had anything to do with this bill. 
     As to the second, it looks as if a major reason the hearing has been scheduled for next week is Congressional unhappiness about reinstating reconsideration in some states. If that's the case, how about we end reconsideration in all states?