Budget Falls As Workload Increases

     From the U.S. News and World Report:

Citing budget pressures, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has once again suspended mailing paper statements and will begin next month to close its more than 1,200 field offices 30 minutes earlier each day. Next January, the offices will begin closing at noon each Wednesday. ...

"People are not going to get their calls answered properly, and they're going to show up at [Social Security] offices and find them closed," says Timothy Gearan, senior legislative representative at AARP. "That's going to cause a lot of trouble." ..

Citing Social Security statistics, Gearan says more than 180,000 people a day visit Social Security offices and nearly 450,000 a day call the agency for assistance. Both numbers are rising due to increasing claims spurred by the recession plus the surge of retiring baby boomers.

Gearan says the SSA has been victimized by continuing legislative gridlock between Congressional Republicans and Democrats. The department's funding for operational expenses is paid from discretionary appropriations, not from the independent Social Security trust funds. Current agency administrative spending is about $11.8 billion a year, Gearan says. "Social Security was spending just about that amount two years ago, and we know we've had a heck of a lot more people coming through" since then to use agency services. The agency's budget "is about a billion dollars below where we think it should be."

"They've lost 9,000 employees over the past three years," he says, "and we expect them to lose another 1,000 jobs this year ... They're doing wonderful work but they're just caught in a bind between the two parties in Congress."

     Social Security is not "caught in a bind between the two parties in Congress." One party wants to adequately fund Social Security. The other party is blocking adequate funding because it wants to cut Social Security's budget to the point that the agency is incapable of operating. Knock off the false equivalence. Be honest about what's happening.
     The head of the union that represents most Social Security employees has also written on the same subject for the Federal Times.

Award For OIG

     From the Covington Reporter:

The Social Security Office of Inspector General anti-fraud team, including the team in Western Washington, is being recognized with a Commissioner’s Citation, the Social Security Administration’s top honor, for its outstanding work investigating and prosecuting government benefit fraud cases.

In fiscal year 2012, the Western District of Washington led the nation in the number of convictions for benefit fraud and the total amount of restitution ordered.  The award is for results in 2011, when Western Washington also led the nation in convictions and was first in the amount of restitution ordered to reimburse the Social Security Administration for fraudulently-obtained benefits.

More Of The Work Incentives Nonsense

     Julie Turkewitz and Juliet Linderman have a piece in today's New York Times Opinion section calling for more work incentives in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability program. They believe that there are many SSI disability recipients who would like to go back to work but who are trapped because of a lack of work incentives in the SSI program. 

     Turkewitz and Linderman are wrong. We have an incredible assortment of work incentives in the larger non-needs based Disability Insurance Benefits (DIB) run by Social Security. These work incentives have not caused any significant number of DIB recipients to return to work. SSI disability recipients are, on the whole, far more hopeless candidates to return to work than DIB recipients since they are people who had little or no work history before going on SSI disability benefits to begin with. At least DIB recipients worked regularly in the years leading up to going on disability benefits. You're never going to return many SSI disability benefits recipients to return to work. They're too sick and too many of them have diminished cognitive abilities and chronic mental illness for this to be realistic.

     I have serious questions about the person that Turkewitz and Linderman use as their poster child, Brad Crelia. Why is it that he never earned enough money to get DIB?  Apparently, he did work a fair amount in the past. Why doesn't he just get a regular job now and give up SSI? According to Turkewitz and Linderman that's what he wants to do. What's holding him back? Is it really a  lack of work incentives? He'd certainly have more income if he went to work.  Exactly what work incentive does he need to return to work anyway. The piece says at one point that Crelia dropped out of college because he was too sick to continue but at another point says that Social Security should have given him a loan so he could finish college. Which is it? If he was too sick to continue his education, a loan wasn't going to help. If a loan was all he needed, why did he need Social Security to give him the loan? It's possible to get educational loans whether you're disabled or not. Crelia's story doesn't make much sense.

     Members of Congress like to think that it would be possible to significantly reduce the money spent on disability benefits by providing additional work incentives. They keep enacting one work incentive after another thinking that just one more piece of legislation will do the trick and disabled people will flow back to work. The result is an extraordinarily complex system of work incentives that don't work. Social Security employees don't understand them so how can we expect disability benefits recipients to understand them? Even if they did understand them, the disability recipients wouldn't go back to work for a simple reason. It's so damned difficult to get on Social Security disability benefits that very few people who get on benefits have any realistic hope of ever returning to regular work. They're way too sick.

Security Upgrade Planned For Central Offices

     From the Baltimore Sun:

The Social Security Administration is planning to build a "security barrier" at its Woodlawn headquarters that officials say is needed to protect employees and visitors.

Though available details of its design are sparse — several elected officials said they had not yet been briefed on the plans — an agency spokesman acknowledged that millions of dollars have been budgeted for security upgrades at the agency's headquarters, including some form of barrier.

Your Trivia For Today

     From Mental Floss:

Who got the lowest Social Security Number?

The SSA [Social Security Administration] had some control over where numbers were issued because of the early geographic distribution of the area number. The lowest numbers went to the northeast states, and while Maine, the most northeasterly of them, should have gotten the block of numbers starting in 001, that group number actually went to New Hampshire.

This was done so that the lowest possible SSN, 001-01-0001, could be given to Social Security Board Chairman and former New Hampshire governor John G. Winant. He passed on the number, so the SSA then offered it to John Campbell, a Regional Representative of the Federal Bureau of Old Age Benefits. He didn’t want it either. The SSA finally decided to just assign it to the first New Hampshire applicant, Grace D. Owen of Concord.

A Press Release

     The National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) has put out a press release on its ongoing conference in Seattle and saluting its outgoing president, Chuck Martin, and its incoming president, Debra Shifrin. Certainly, Chuck and Debra deserve the recognition. The bigger point is that NOSSCR now has a public relations firm putting out press releases on its behalf. NOSSCR also has a political action committee (PAC). The PR firm and the PAC are new. Why does a 32 year old organization like NOSSCR suddenly decide it needs a PR firm and a PAC? It's the political environment NOSSCR members and their clients face.  We have to arm ourselves. There are people gunning for us.

AARP Opposes Extension Of Partial FICA Holiday

     AARP has come out in opposition to any extension of the partial F.I.C.A. tax holiday. The F.I.C.A. tax supports the Social Security trust funds. The partial F.I.C.A. tax holiday of the last two years is set to expire at the end of the year unless continued. General revenues have been used to make up for the lost F.I.C.A. tax revenues over the last two years.

No News Is No News

     I am at the conference of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) in Seattle. Normally on the first full day of the conference I post a summary of the morning general session or if I can't make it to the conference, I find someone who is present to write a summary to post here. Usually, there is real news coming out of this session. This year there has been no real news. This is not because the conference is deficient. This is what I expected. It's just the time frame that the conference occurs in. A general election is right around the corner. Things may be vastly different at Social Security depending upon the results of that election. Also, the Commissioner of Social Security, Michael Astrue, will be leaving office in less than three months, regardless of the election results. Even if you knew who will win the Presidential election, you could not now predict who will replace Astrue. How the new Commissioner  will manage Social Security will depend not merely upon who is in the White House, but also upon which party controls the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Another Appellate Decision Holding DOMA Unconstitutional

     A second federal court of appeals has declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. DOMA prevents the Social Security Administration from recognizing same sex marriages allowed under state law. This issue will be decided by the Supreme Court in the not too distant future. There is an issue about whether it is constitutional for a state to outlaw same sex marriages. That argument may or may not prevail at the Supreme Court but it's different and not as strong as the argument that DOMA is unconstitutional.

Weirdness At AARP

    AARP is running a $50,000 Fill The Social Security Gap Sweepstakes where you can "Empower yourself with Social Security facts" and  "win big!"