House lawmakers heard competing proposals designed to ferret out the number of illegal workers in the labor market in a year when even modest attempts at immigration reform appear to be a difficult task. ...
The discrepancy between competing workplace verification proposals was on full display Tuesday, as a House Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee heard two ideas for changing the role of the nation’s electronic verification system, also known as E-Verify. ...
A bill by Rep. Health Shuler (D-N.C.) would mandate that the E-Verify pilot program currently in use by some 61,000 employers be uniformly adopted by the estimated 7.4 million employers across the country. ...But already a competing and wholly different employment verification proposal is emerging from another bipartisan group in the House.
Social Security Subcommittee ranking member Sam Johnson (R-Texas) and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) have introduced legislation to require only newly hired employees to be subject to verification. They called their bill superior to Shuler’s proposal. Giffords said that Arizona’s experience using E-Verify has been less than stellar.
Many businesses in her state are finding E-Verify “complicated, unreliable and burdensome,” Giffords said. “From our experience in Arizona we know what isn’t working.”
The Johnson-Giffords New Employee Verification, or NEVA, Act, would check only new and non-citizen hires against the “new hire reporting” database put in place by states 12 years ago to track down so-called deadbeat dads, and would not rely on the Social Security Administration (SSA) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they said.
Johnson and Giffords found a warm reception from Social Security subcommittee Chairman Michael McNulty (D-N.Y.) who homed in on how E-Verify is leaning heavily on what he said was already an overburdened SSA. ...McNulty questioned Shuler and Calvert on E-Verify’s impact on SSA, and reminded them of the average wait time — well over a year — for a Social Security disability claim to be processed in their districts.
“Imposing a substantial new immigration-related workload on SSA would potentially swamp the agency and threaten its ability to serve our constituents who rely on Social Security and SSI for basic income,” McNulty said. “For this reason, proposals for mandatory verification that do not realistically address the workload placed on SSA’s shoulders should not be enacted.” ...
Despite their differences in approaches — which aides described as deep on Tuesday — lawmakers on both sides followed their testimony with statements indicating that some kind of common ground could be found.
May 6, 2008
Competing Proposals Aired At Social Security Subcommittee Hearing
$1 Billion In First Year?
The National Committee was dismayed to learn that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost to SSA of the major immigration proposal would be more than $1 billion – nearly 10 percent of the agency’s administrative budget – in just the first year of implementation. Over 10 years, the plan would cost over $9 billion.
Cost Of Mandatory E-Verify
SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears for fiscal years 2009 through 2013.
Roundup Of News Items
- The Times Observer of Warren, Pennsylvania is running a story on Kathy Bimber who says she was left legally blind by a tumor, but who was denied Social Security disability benefits. She has contacted many elected officials without success. She is draining her family's savings as she waits for a hearing that may be two years off. Mrs. Bimber cannot understand since she says "I don't want welfare."
- CBS 46 in Atlanta reports on the delays in obtaining a hearing on a Social Security disability claims. I had wondered when a news outlet in Atlanta would finally report this story. Atlanta has the worst backlogs in the country.
- The Galveston News has an editorial on the decision to close the local Social Security field office. I would suggest that the paper start asking their Congressional representatives what they plan to do to prevent this office closure. See below.
- The Quad-City Times is running an article on the successful effort to keep the Clinton, Iowa Social Security field office open. The effort was successful due to the efforts of the state's Congressional representatives, particularly Senator Harkin.
Growth At Memphis ODAR Office
The Social Security Administration Office of Disability, Adjudication and Review [ODAR] will move ... by the end of June.
The government agency ... will employ 45 people in the Downtown office building.
The Social Security office ... had outgrown its space.
House Social Security Subcommittee Hearing This Morning
The hearing should be available in streaming video.
May 5, 2008
NADE Newsletter: Meetings, OIG Investigation, Legislative Proposal?, Differing Viewpoints On Testing For Malingering
Some nuggets from the newsletter (with a couple of comment in brackets]:
- A description of a meeting between NADE leaders and Michael Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security
- A reference to a "closed" meeting between Astrue and members of the House Social Security Subcommittee
- "The Inspector General is doing an audit of SSA and state DDSs in response to the CBS program which indicated there is a 'climate of denial'. The IG staff plan to speak with DDS examiners in several states and people have left the state DDS agencies." [I will make a fearless prediction that Social Security's Inspector General will not find a "climate of denial."]
- "Legislation is being developed to allow SSA to request health records without an actual release form. The legislation will offer the assurance that SSA has an Electronic signature on file. Legislation has also been proposed to require attorneys to use iAppeal, the internet appeal process." [Legislation? I had heard that Social Security was considering requiring attorneys to file appeals via the internet, but I had assumed that regulations would be proposed. Did NADE misunderstand? If it is legislation, what else would be in this legislative proposal?]
A RECENT POLICY CLARIFICATION to a DDS questioner by the Social Security Administration on whether “tests of malingering” have any value for SSA evaluations will have a chilling effect on the scientific responsibility of psychology examiners to assess the validity of their findings. We believe this policy to be misguided, for it leads to inaccurate assessment in psychological consultative examinations (PCEs), and it can actually be harmful in permitting fraud, waste, and abuse of the system.
The policy statement claims that “malingering cannot be proven with tests,” and “malingering is one aspect of the larger sphere of inaccurate self-report.” The writer also said that the claimant who is likely to be malingering may have true impairment, and thus it is difficult to distinguish limiting effects of impairment from evidence that the impairment is fabricated or exaggerated. Echoing statements to the Administrative Law Judges (2005) by Dr. Terrence Dunlop, chief psychologist for DDS, the writer concludes that Symptom Validity Tests (SVT) are not “programmatically useful” in resolving the issue of credibility of claimants, and that there is no “gold standard” for establishing symptom validity.
This policy ignores the rigorous scientific development of symptom validity testing and malingering assessment over the last 10-15 years ...
On Hold
The Social Security Administration's has reduced its staffing by more than 5 percent since 2003, to about 60,000.
That means seniors such as Early L. Graham of Raleigh have dealt with long hold times and promises of call backs that never come.
"I had to call three different numbers before I got anyone on the phone," Graham said.
Brian Simpson, a spokesman at the Social Security office in Raleigh, said he hears similar complaints all the time.
Trying to handle customer demand with fewer employees, the agency has shifted some workers away from phone lines to front desks to assist walk-in clients.
Graham, 64, said he has tried for more than a year to resolve a complicated issue regarding his Social Security payments. On the rare occasions when he has gotten someone on the phone, he has had to explain his situation from the beginning.
Success In New Jersey
It was an unexpected and totally welcome surprise.Cassandra Kutner, a Lafayette wife and mother of two who was caught in a cycle of debt and unpaid bills, feels like she "won the lottery" when she got a call Monday from Social Security informing her that she had been approved for disability payments.
Kutner and her family had been living without her income since her multiple sclerosis worsened to the point that she could no longer work as a paralegal. She applied for disability in July 2007, and received a denial in February. In the meantime, bills kept piling up on the counter, and the family had even started using a wood-burning stove to lower their heating bills. But Kutner hired a lawyer, and the New Jersey Herald covered her story. ...
[I]n a little over two months, she got the call from Social Security telling her she'd received disability.
"It was way, way sooner than we had thought ... it was way earlier than we had expected," she said.
May 4, 2008
UNUM Forced To Approve 42% Of Reviewed Claims
This is from the Insurance Journal:
In a forced self-review, the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Unum Group agreed to fully or partly reverse 42 percent of previously denied disability claims and paid out $676 million in additional benefits.The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance said the agreement with the Chattanooga-based insurer involved a review of claims from January 1997 through 2004.
An investigation of complaints about Unum's claims handling led to a $1 million fine in March 2003 after Georgia's insurance commissioner said regulators found a mindset of looking "for every technical legal way to avoid paying a claim.'' ...
Company spokesman Jim Sabourin said the reviews have been based on new standards and do not necessarily mean mistakes were made the first time.
"Essentially we are pleased that the exam process has been concluded and particularly pleased with the results,'' he said. "We have taken a lot of steps over the last couple of years to improve our claims practices and processes.''
Sabourin said the company handles about 400,000 claims a year and pays out about $6 billion in benefits, including $4.3 billion for disability.
He said the review started with the company sending about 300,000 letters to customers. About 70,000 of those "opted in,'' and about 20,000 of those responded and had their claims reviewed.
Sabourin said 41.7 percent of those 20,000 were reversed.