The Real Problem Is Appeals Council Backlogs

     In the wake of Social Security Ruling 11-1p which seeks to prevent claimants from filing a new claim while an old one is pending before the Appeals Council, I thought I would check on my firm's oldest pending Appeals Council cases. We have one that was filed on January 8, 2009 and another filed on April 28, 2009.
     A claimant is supposed to wait over two and a half years for Appeals Council action without the possibility of filing a new claim? Social Security claims that it is trying to stop an abusive practice, but isn't the real problem the backlog at the Appeals Council? Take that away and there is little incentive to file a new claim while an appeal is pending at the Appeals Council.

     By the way, any numbers you get out of the Appeals Council on their backlogs are misleading. For many years, maybe decades, the Appeals Council has followed a practice of shoving the easy ones out the door as quickly as possible. If an unrepresented claimant files a request for Appeals Council review, it gets denied quickly, at least in Appeals Council terms. If a represented claimant files a request for Appeals Council review but the attorney or representative gives no specific reason for the appeal, it gets denied quickly. However, if the claimant is represented and gives good reasons why the Appeals Council should reverse or remand the case, expect it to take at least a year.

Fair And Balanced Reporting From The AP

From the Associated Press:

Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security's disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency. ...
"It's primarily economic desperation," Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said in an interview. "People on the margins who get bad news in terms of a layoff and have no other place to go and they take a shot at disability," ...
The disability program "got into trouble first because of liberalization of eligibility standards in the 1980s," said Charles Blahous, one of the public trustees who oversee Social Security. "Then it got another shove into bigger trouble during the recent recession."  ...
Last year, Social Security detected $1.4 billion in overpayments to disability beneficiaries, mostly to people who got jobs and no longer qualified, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Average Retirement Age Increases

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College is reporting that since the mid-1990s the average retirement age for men has increased from 62 to 64 and for women from 60 to 62. The researcher relates this to:

• changing incentives in Social Security and employer pensions;
• better education and health coupled with less strenuous jobs; and
• the decline in retiree health insurance.

Planning For Austerity

From instructions sent out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is part of the White House, to all federal agencies:

In light of the tight limits on discretionary spending starting in 2012, your 2013 budget submission to OMB should provide options to support the President's commitment to cut waste and reorder priorities to achieve deficit reduction while investing in those areas critical to job creation and economic growth. Unless your agency has been given explicit direction otherwise by OMB, your overall agency request for 2013 should be at least 5 percent below your 2011 enacted discretionary appropriation. As discussed at the recent Cabinet meetings, your 2013 budget submission should also identify additional discretionary funding reductions that would bring your request to a level that is at least 10 percent below your 2011 enacted discretionary appropriation.

The 2013 federal fiscal year will begin on October 1, 2012.

OIG Report On Representative Video Project

Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released a report on the "Representative Video Project" that allows attorneys and other representing Social Security claimants to participate in Social Security hearings using their own video equipment. OIG reports that there has been a problem with public communication about the program, probably because Social Security did not think through what it wanted to accomplish.

Social Security Employee Indicted For Defrauding Claimants

From the Los Angeles Times:

A federal grand jury has indicted an employee at the Social Security Administration’s Whittier office on charges that she stole money from beneficiaries.

Gezal Rebbecca Duran, 32, of Pomona was indicted Tuesday on four counts of theft by a government employee.

Duran, who worked as a claims representative, allegedly told benefit recipients that they had received overpayments and needed to pay her in order to bring their accounts current. Investigators believe she sole more than $17,000 from at least 15 benefit recipients, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Work Incentives Planning And Assistance

From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

From 2006 through 2010, SSA awarded about $93 million in grant funds to 103 grantees to provide work incentives planning and assistance[WIPA] to Disability Insurance and/or Supplemental Security Income beneficiaries. However, the Agency was still unable to show employment outcomes for beneficiaries receiving WIPA services because of the challenges with the quality and accuracy of the beneficiary data collected and reported by WIPA grantees. In addition, SSA did not clearly outline specific performance measurements that defined the level of performance the WIPA grantees were to achieve.

I have seen no evidence on the ground of anything accomplished by these WIPA grantees. Is anyone familiar with anything whatsoever accomplished by these WIPA grantees?

"38 Life-Altering Mistakes A Day"

     From CNN Money:

Of the approximately 2.8 million death reports the Social Security Administration receives per year, about 14,000 -- or one in every 200 deaths -- are incorrectly entered into its Death Master File, which contains the Social Security numbers, names, birth dates, death dates, zip codes and last-known residences of more than 87 million deceased Americans. That averages out to 38 life-altering mistakes a day. ...

"It is unfortunate, but some of the death data that we post to our records ... proves to be wrong and we correct it as soon as possible," said administration spokesman Mark Hinkle. "Usually the error was inadvertently caused because of a human typing error when death information was entered into a computer system."

This inaccurate information is then sold to the public, as well as to banks and credit bureaus.

Those who are declared dead not only lose their ability to apply for credit or receive benefits, but they are also at a high risk for identity theft now that all of their personally-identifying information has been made public.

In one review, the Inspector General found that months after the Social Security Administration deleted incorrect information from the database, the personally identifiable information of 28% of the individuals was still publicly available on at least one other web site.

Answer To Quiz

     People had trouble with this one!

     Question: Mr. A drives while intoxicated. He causes a terrible car crash which kills the driver of another vehicle. Mr. A is convicted of vehicular homicide, a felony under state law. He is sentenced to two years in prison. He serves those two years in prison. After he leaves prison, Mr. A files a claim for Disability Insurance Benefits (DIB) and SSI (SSI) since in the same car crash Mr. A was badly and permanently injured. He has no serious health problems other than those related to the car crash. He has no income or resources. Mr. A is potentially eligible for:

     Possible answers:
DIB only
SSI only
Both DIB and SSI
Neither DIB nor SSI

The answer is SSI only. 42 U.S.C. §423(d)(6) provides that:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, any physical or mental impairment which arises in connection with the commission by an individual (after the date of the enactment of this paragraph) of an offense which constitutes a felony under applicable law and for which such individual is subsequently convicted, or which is aggravated in connection with such an offense (but only to the extent so aggravated), shall not be considered in determining whether an individual is under a disability.

There is no parallel provision in the statute defining disability for purposes of SSI.

Customer Service Delivery Plan

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report recommending that Social Security adopt a long term service delivery plan and by long term they mean ten years.

     I have heard this sort of recommendation before. I think it is nonsense. First of all, how do you make a long term plan when you have no idea what sort of appropriation you will have for the next fiscal year much less ten years from now? Second, even if you could predict your appropriation, how do you predict future information technology availability and public usage of that technology.? 

     The report is based upon a firm conviction that the public's usage of the internet will continue to soar indefinitely and that Social Security must plan for this. That is preposterous. At some point in the near future, internet usage is going to bump into hard barriers. A certain proportion of the population is illiterate or barely literate. There will always be limits on how much that group will use the internet. There are only so many hours in the day that the rest of us will spend on the internet. Internet use does not keep soaring forever. 

     I can tell you and any experienced field office employee at Social Security can tell you that Social Security is just too complicated and people are just too complicated to make the assumption that the agency's workload can ever be transferred to computers.