NOSSCR Bad Luck For New Orleans Area?

In the Fall of 2005 the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) was scheduled to have a national conference in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area in late August of that year. The conference was abruptly shifted to Orlando. Once again, NOSSCR has a national conference set for New Orleans. It will begin on May 12. Another disaster is just starting for the New Orleans area as a massive oil spill is coming ashore, threatening to do enormous damage to Louisiana's fragile estuaries.

Will New Orleans ever allow NOSSCR to return?

There's A Lot Of This

From the Petaluma Press-Democrat:

You'll have to forgive Morgan Hayes if she's a bit skeptical of the latest letter she received from the Social Security Administration saying she does not need to repay a $15,300 overpayment.

Hayes, a Petaluma senior citizen, was threatened in March with having to repay that sum after a seven-month Social Security payment snafu.

Late last week, she was notified that she isn't responsible for fixing the government's error.

Hayes' saga began in September, when Hayes was credited with $13,733 and was told her monthly payment would increase by $260. Repeated letters said the lump sum was to rectify years of underpayments to her.

After multiple assurances from Social Security that the money was hers to spend, Hayes used it to pay down debt and get a newer used car.

But then in March, the government reversed itself and said the credit and monthly increase were mistakes and it wanted the money back, $15,329 in total. Worse, she was told she had 30 days to send in the full amount or her benefits would be completely cut off until it was repaid.

Yes, there are ways to take care of this sort of thing. Thank goodness Ms. Hayes eventually got help. The problem is that most people have no idea what to do. Since these cases cannot be done on a contingent fee basis most people are unable to hire someone like me to help them.

Update: The overpayment has now been waived.

A Blast From The Past -- And Some Of Us Haven't Forgotten

From the Arkansas News:

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s re-election campaign has adopted a line of attack against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter that was first advanced by a group she previously said had no connection to her campaign.

Lincoln, locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with Halter for the Democratic nomination for her Senate seat, said previously she had no connection to the group Arkansans for Common Sense, which ran an ad accusing Halter of trying to privatize Social Security when he ran that agency under President Bill Clinton. ...

“When corporate millionaire Bill Halter was a commissioner of the Social Security Administration in 2000, he wanted to invest Social Security revenues in the stock market, claiming his plan would strengthen Social Security,” the mailer reads, adding that this would have endangered over 600,000 Arkansans who receive Social Security benefits.

In a statement today, Halter’s campaign said again, as it did in response to the Arkansans for Common Sense ad, that Halter’s comments in 2000 were in reference to a proposal by Clinton to invest a small portion of the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market.

You may not remember Halter as Commissioner of Social Security. That is because he was Acting Commissioner of Social Security from January 20 to March 29, 2001. Before that he was Deputy Commissioner.

I can give a much better reason for criticizing Halter for his work as Acting Commissioner. He did nothing as the Hearing Process Improvement (HPI) debacle was causing Social Security's hearing process to collapse. HPI was only being implemented as the Clinton Administration was ending. It was immediately apparent that HPI would be a calamity. Halter was only Acting Commissioner after the inauguration of George W. Bush but how was the Bush Administration going to punish him for taking action on HPI -- fire him? The Bush Administration has much responsibility for the hearing backlog that Social Security has now but so does the Clinton Administration. Social Security was in free fall during the transition between Clinton and Bush. In an emergency, real leaders take action. That was an emergency and Halter sat on his hands.

It's Gotten Worse In Omaha

From the Omaha Journal-Star:

Five of Omaha attorney Tim Cuddigan's clients died this year waiting for Social Security disability decisions.

It's a long wait across the country, but Nebraskans wait longer than most.

Nebraskans who apply for disability insurance wait an average of two years for a final decision from the Social Security Administration. ...

In the past six months, while the national average improved, the average wait for a hearing in the Omaha office got longer. ...

A Social Security Administration spokesman said Omaha is slated to get a judge in the next round of hirings.

Help For Thousands

From New American Media:

Rosa Martinez didn’t know what to do when the Social Security Administration told her two years ago that the agency was stopping her disability assistance because she had an outstanding 1980 arrest warrant for illegal possession of prescription drugs in Miami. A resident of Redwood City, Calif., she has never visited Miami. ...

She pleaded with a series of bureaucrats that she could not be the same Rosa Martinez named in the old warrant, a Rosa eight inches taller. But those please fell on deaf ears.

“Maybe God put me in this situation so I could help others,” she said at a New America Media press briefing, where she and legal aid attorneys described how she became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, Martinez v. Astrue, against the Social Security Administration. Michael Astrue is the Social Security commissioner.

The class action lawsuit led to federal court settlement that will return up to $500 million to about a quarter million people, who had their Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) supports wrongfully cut off by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Outreach is critical, though, because many people who lost their benefits over the last 10 years must reapply to Social Security. In some cases eligible people have only about six months to apply or they risk permanently losing those benefits. ...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) will soon be notifying people, mainly by mail, that they can reapply for assistance.

Help Needed

I have received the following e-mail from Peter Martin who is the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell and the former dean of the law school:

As the author of a Social Security law resource (http://www.law.cornell.edu/socsec/) I was recently asked to do a presentation for a group of academics on "when to claim Social Security [retirement] benefits".

I later decided to try to rework the talk for a broader audience. If you or a colleague should have time to look at it, I would welcome feedback. You will find the current version at: http://www.access-to-law.com/socsec

Please find some time to give Professor Martin some help. With the aging of the baby boom generation, this question gets asked more and more.

Yesterday's Hearing

Federal News Radio has an article about yesterday's Congressional hearing as does the Imperial Valley News.

The Subcommittees involved have posted a number of charts used at the hearing. The one I found most interesting is to the left. Click on it to see it full size.

Videos from the hearing are also available online.

• Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Earl Pomeroy
• Income and Security Subcommittee Chairman Jim McDermott
• Congressman Bob Filner
• Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue
• DanBertoni of the Government Accountability Office
• Social Security Inspector General Patrick O'Carroll
• Nancy Shor, Executive Director of National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives, speaking for the Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities
• Administrative Law Judge Randall Frye, speaking for the Association of Administrative Law Judges
• Harris County Deputy Sheriff Eddie Willrich

Social Security's plan to reinstate the reconsideration step in the ten states in which it had been eliminated is quite controversial. This came up in the remarks of many of the witnesses.

Another ALJ For Omaha

From the Omaha World-Herald:

The Omaha hearings office that reviews appeals from most Nebraskans and western Iowans expects to hire a judge soon to fill a slot that has been vacant since last year, said Michael Astrue, commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

The new judge should hear cases by the first week of July, Astrue told The World-Herald on Tuesday. His comments came after he testified before Congress about the continued backlog of disability claims nationwide.

"A Rare Computer Error"

WSPA in Greenville-Spartanburg, SC is running a story about a man who was approved for Supplemental Security Income but who did not receive his back benefits for more than a year. Social Security blamed the delay on "a rare computer error" but Social Security's Inspector General testified yesterday before a Congressional committee that there were a number of other people in the same boat. My experience is that delays of this sort are vastly more common than what the Inspector General found.

Witness List For Today's Hearing

The witness list is out for today's joint hearing of the Social Security and Income Security Subcommittees of the House Ways and Means Committee:

PANEL:

• The Honorable Bob Filner, a Representative in Congress from the State of California

PANEL:

• The Honorable Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner, Social Security Administration

An excerpt:
In Michigan, an economically hard-hit State, we have concluded that too many cases are needlessly going to the hearings level from the DDSs. Therefore, we plan to reinstate reconsideration in Michigan next fiscal year. ...

[W]e are also looking at reinstating reconsideration in Colorado, at the request of the Governor. ...

By the end of FY 2010, we expect to have 2,800 more DDS employees on board than we did at the end of FY 2008 ...

We are in-sourcing verbatim hearing reporting to further improve ALJ productivity. [Note that he appears to be talking about replacing contractors with federal employees.] ...

To assist with decision writing and case preparation in our hearing offices, we will establish National Case Assistance Centers (NCAC) in McLean, Virginia, and St. Louis, Missouri. The McLean NCAC is scheduled to open in May 2010 and will perform decision writing only. The St. Louis NCAC will be co-located with the new St. Louis NHC, opening in July 2010, and will both write decisions and prepare cases.
PANEL:

• Dan Bertoni, Director for Disability Issues Education, Workforce & Income Security Team, U.S. Government Accountability Office
• The Honorable Patrick P. O’Carroll, Inspector General, Social Security Administration

An excerpt:

As devastating as the wait for a decision can be, it is perhaps more troubling that, even once a claim is approved, there can be a delay in SSA actually issuing the funds awarded to the claimant. In conducting the survey described above, we discovered that some individuals whose claims were allowed were never paid. As a result, we have commenced an audit entitled Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income Claims Approved But Not Paid. In this audit, we are examining the extent to which this occurs. Although not completed, our review of almost half a million 2006 disability allowances in the Title II and Title XVI programs revealed initially that 61 deserving claimants had never been paid, and that another 19 did not begin receiving payments as early as they should have.

• Nancy Shor, Executive Director, National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on behalf of Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Social Security Task Force
• The Honorable D. Randall Frye, Administrative Law Judge, Kings Mountain, North Carolina on behalf of Association of Administrative Law Judges

An excerpt:
We are presently informed that in some hearing offices cases are assigned out of rotation and reassigned from one judge to another. We believe such a practice must be discontinued as it is inconsistent with the APA [Administrative Procedure Act] and legal precedent and is detrimental to the American people.

• Eddie Willrich, Deputy Sheriff, Harris County Sheriff's Office, Houston, Texas, accompanied by Carol Durkin, Special Agent and Team Leader, Cooperative Disability Investigation Unit, Houston, Texas