Should Martin Gerry have been fired in the manner in which he was fired (lock on door changed, escorted out of building by security guard)?| Yes (68) | 54% |
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| No (32) | 26% |
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| Don't Know/No opinion (25) | 20% |
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| Excellent (10) | 16% |
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| Good (10) | 16% |
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| Fair (21) | 34% |
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| Poor (21) | 34% |
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...Andrew Biggs, the president’s choice to be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, is a champion of partially privatizing the program he is being sent to administer. The agency dispenses checks to beneficiaries and traditionally provides factual information on the state of the program. But under this president the agency has become increasingly politicized, using questionable arguments and projections to support Mr. Bush’s drive for private accounts. As a lower ranking official in the agency, Mr. Biggs was in the thick of that politicization. His appointment is a sure sign that Mr. Bush intends to keep using the agency as a propaganda machine to push a privatization scheme that has little public support.
Fee Payments | ||
|---|---|---|
| Month/Year | Volume | Amount |
| Jan-07 | 15,331 | $55,149,991.81 |
| Feb-07 | 19,301 | $69,731,683.72 |
| Mar-07 | 26,505 | $94,396,916.02 |
• Earnings outcomes were mixed in the year following VR [Vocational Rehabilitation] and also over time. Approximately 40 percent of the over 303,500 SSA disability beneficiaries in our study increased their earnings compared to the year prior to VR services, while 32 percent did not have any earnings and another 28 percent had fewer earnings. In comparison to DI [Disability Insurance Benefits] and concurrent beneficiaries, more SSI beneficiaries—42 percent versus 36 and 39 percent—increased their earnings in the year following VR. Of the disability beneficiaries who exited VR in fiscal year 2000, 33 percent sustained some level of earnings through 2004, although their median earnings decreased by 12 percent over this period.
• Most beneficiaries’ annual earnings remained below annualized SGA [Substantial Gainful Activity, which would be enough earnings to eventually cut off benefits] in the year following VR. Specifically, 88 percent of all disability beneficiaries in our study had annual earnings below annualized SGA in the year following VR. Only a small percentage (5 percent) of beneficiaries from each cohort had annual earnings just below annualized SGA (i.e., earning over 75 percent of, but less than annualized SGA) in the year after VR. However, this does not provide evidence that beneficiaries either were or were not “parking”—i.e., deliberately remaining just below program income limits to retain benefits. Because SSA did not collect monthly earnings for DI beneficiaries during the timeframe of our study, we used annualized earnings for both DI and SSI beneficiaries, thereby limiting our ability to determine the extent of “parking” on a monthly basis.18 For beneficiaries who had earned income in the year after VR, their median annual earnings were $4,476.
• Some beneficiaries in our study earned enough to have their benefits reduced in the year after VR, resulting in decreased DI and SSI program expenses. Benefit reductions from DI and concurrent beneficiaries in our four cohorts who did not receive DI benefits for 1 or more months due to work in the year after VR resulted in an estimated reduction in DI benefit payments of over $106 million. The average annual reduction in DI benefits due to work was $26.6 million. Of the 70,302 SSI and concurrent beneficiaries in our study who had earnings gains from the year before VR to the year after VR, almost 50,000 (71 percent) had a reduction in their SSI benefits. However, we were unable to reliably estimate SSI benefit reductions for SSI and concurrent beneficiaries because SSI benefit amounts can be affected by other factors besides earnings increases (e.g., changes in unearned income, spouse’s income, etc.), and, due to data limitations, we could not isolate the effect of beneficiaries’ earnings increases on their SSI benefit levels.
• For the 2000 and 2001 exit cohorts, 10 percent of beneficiaries were able to leave the rolls at some point by 2005; however, about a quarter of those who left also returned for at least 1 month. While the SSI program saw the most departures, the lower rate of DI and concurrent beneficiaries leaving the rolls may be due to several factors. For example, DI beneficiaries are generally afforded a much longer working period before cash benefits are completely discontinued, and delays in the reporting of beneficiaries’ earnings data to SSA are much more likely to occur for DI beneficiaries. The median annual earned income for all beneficiaries leaving the rolls was $12,027.21 By way of comparison, the average annualized SGA was $9,618, and the average annualized disability benefit was $8,460 for the DI beneficiaries and $4,452 for the SSI beneficiaries in our study in the year after VR.22 Those who returned were off the rolls for an average of 16 months.
Over the past decade, the number of disability appeals reviewed by the district courts and the proportion of remands increased, and SSA subsequently granted benefits to claimants in many of the remanded cases. Between 1995 and 2005, the number of cases reviewed by federal district courts grew by 20 percent—from about 10,300 to some 12,400—which roughly corresponds to workload increases at SSA during the same period. During this period, the courts upheld SSA’s decisions to deny benefits in 44 percent of cases on average and reversed 6 percent. However, the most frequently occurring decisions were remands back to the agency for further review (50 percent), essentially resulting in additional work for SSA. The proportion of reviewed cases that were remanded increased by 36 percent over this period, with 1998 being the pivotal year when the proportion of remands exceeded affirmations. According to some SSA officials, this notable increase may have been due to new national guidelines for SSA adjudicators—known as the process unification rulings—that may have also led to federal courts using more remands to ensure that the guidelines were followed. With regard to the disposition of cases by geographic jurisdiction or judicial circuit, there was substantial variation in 2005, the year for which detailed data were available. Federal district courts in the Second Circuit—which serves part of the Northeast—affirmed 19 percent and remanded 74 percent of cases, while district courts in the Sixth Circuit—which serves Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee—affirmed 61 percent and remanded 35 percent. According to SSA officials, case outcomes may vary from circuit to circuit because of differences such as judges’ interpretations of laws and the volume of cases that circuits examine. We also found that once cases were remanded back to SSA for re-adjudication, the majority of claimants—66 percent—were awarded benefits. According to agency officials, the changing nature or severity of claimants’ disabilities over the often lengthy period of appeal may contribute to the extent of allowances for remanded cases. ...
... many stakeholders said SSA decision makers had failed to properly consider the opinions of treating physicians. Many agency officials as well as outside stakeholders attributed the errors resulting in remands to a heavy workload. For example, ALJs we spoke with expressed the view that their caseload—around 50 to 60 cases per month—undermined the quality of their written decisions.
We are in the process of reevaluating DSI and looking at more direct ways to reduce backlogs. Your analysis will be helpful to that effort. -- Thanks!"
Deciding whether to go PDF or TIFF with your documents seems like a no-brainer for many users. But there's a time and a place for both document formats. And, increasingly, companies are evaluating whether to switch to using TIFF in their document workflows.We have some themes here:
TIFF, or tagged image file format, is a popular format for high-color depth (32-bit) images. ...
For the majority of users who are putting text in their documents, the PDF is hands down a better choice. It is a universally accepted format that any recipient can view using the free Acrobat Reader utility. ...
[PDF] is also a much more secure file format that offers the ability to control factors such as who can read or alter your document.
You can alter a PDF much more easily than a TIFF file. Between the features available in Acrobat, Acrobat Pro and third-party add-ons, you can do several things not possible with TIFFs, such as:But don't count TIFF out yet. TIFF is a great choice for archiving images, and may be a better choice in the long run than PDF. ...
- Add bookmarks, notes and highlighting without altering the original file
- Insert hyperlinks to other documents
- Index a PDF for complex searches. ...
The major drawback of TIFF is that, because it has been neglected by Adobe, it lacks standardized support for advanced imaging features that have been developed in the last few years. ...
"A TIFF connected to a database with OCR provides the same capability as a PDF with OCR that has been catalogued," says George Thornton, managing partner of On Site E-Discovery. On Site's clients are law firms with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that need to be scanned into digital format, then OCRed and searched for keywords to provide evidence in a case. These databases can grow into multiple terabytes, so saving space is crucial. "When I have a large document collection I use TIFFs with a database," says Thornton. "For business purposes, I tend to send PDFs."
