OMB Clears Proposed Regs On Objecting To Video Hearings

     After nearly five months of review, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has cleared proposed new regulations concerning objecting to video hearings. This proposal was submitted while Michael Astrue was still Commissioner. OMB is part of the White House. OMB has to clear any regulatory proposal made by any agency. Five months is a very long time for one of Social Security's proposals to stay under review at OMB. I would guess that OMB identified this proposal as significant and possibly controversial. OMB's website indicates that there was some change made in the proposed rule while it was under review. Here is Social Security's original summary of the proposal:

We propose to revise our rules to protect the integrity of our programs and to address public concerns regarding the removal of an administrative law judge's name from the Notice of Hearing and other prehearing notices. To accomplish both objectives, these proposed rules state that we will provide an individual with notice that his or her hearing may be held by video teleconferencing and that he or she has an opportunity to object to appearing by video teleconferencing within 30 days of the notice. We have also made changes that allow us to determine that claimant will appear via video teleconferencing if a claimant changes residences while his or her request for hearing is pending. We anticipate these changes will increase the integrity of our programs with minimal impact on the public and result in more efficient administration of our program. 

     We should know soon how this proposal ended up, since it will probably be published in the Federal Register in the next week or two. Note that Social Security will not be publishing a final rule at this time. They will only be publishing a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making (NPRM). The public will get a chance to review the NPRM and comment on it. It will be many months at least before anything becomes final.
     My opinion is that under a rule such as described above many attorneys will advise their clients to refuse video hearings. The main reason that attorneys now advise their clients to accept video hearings is to avoid delay. It's not like we think that a video hearing is just as good as an in-person hearing. If the decision to refuse a video hearing can be made well before any hearing is scheduled, there should be no reason for additional delay associated with asking for an in person hearing. If this goes forward, things may not work out in the way that Social Security expects.
     Also, if a Social Security claimant moves from North Carolina to Minnesota while his or her request for hearing is pending, why does he or she abandon their right to an in person hearing?

Online Crooks Going After Online Accounts

     From WPTV:

A new kind of Social Security scam has left local beneficiaries wondering where their money is.

Pills and bills eat up Patricia Bell's monthly Social Security check.
"Without Social Security, we'd have nothing," said Bell, 71, of Okeechobee.
When she got a letter in the mail saying she had created an online account on Social Security's website, she called her son.
"Right then, I stopped, I said, I didn't do this," said Bell.
But someone had, stealing her personal information, including her Social Security number.
"I have no idea how they did that, " said Bell.
A crook used Social Security's new online system to change her direct deposit information.
They redirected her $1,200 check to themselves. ...

Nationwide, 36,000 have fallen victim since May of 2011. 

     This will only get bigger and bigger. Social Security management needs to face the facts. The online accounts are way too susceptible to fraud. This is probably becoming a cottage industry in places like China or Nigeria. I believe that all you need is access to credit reports and that's not that difficult. Identify an older person using the credit reports, use the information from the older person's credit report to open an account Social Security account in the person's name, divert one month's benefits to a bank account you control and withdraw the money using an ATM. If you're overseas, what's your risk?

A Top Ten List

     The right is really getting invested in the idea that fraud is rampant in Social Security's disability programs. The National Review has posted its Top Ten List of the most outrageous disability cheaters of the past year.

Legislation Proposed

     From a press release:

U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Angus King (I-ME), and Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced the Reducing Overlapping Payments Act, which aims to protect the Social Security Disability Insurance and Unemployment Insurance programs by reducing overlapping benefits. The bill requires the Social Security Administration (SSA) to suspend Disability Insurance (DI) benefits  during any month in which a recipient also collects Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, while also ensuring the SAA [SSA?] has the necessary information to identify overlapping DI and UI payments. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in fiscal year 2010 over 117,000 individuals received more than $850 million in overlapping payments. 

Was Social Security Originally Designed In A Racist Way?

     Brad Plummer writes in the Washington Post about an argument that the Social Security Act as originally passed was designed to exclude most African-American workers. This was supposedly done to gain the support of Southern Democrats in the Congress. This was accomplished by excluding agricultural workers and maids, the most important occupations for African-Americans in the South at the time.
     The counter-argument is that agricultural workers and maids were excluded for reasons of administrative feasibility and that Southerners in Congress at the time expressed no strong views on the subject.

Criticism For "Unfit For Work"

     Trudy Lieberman, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, takes a belated look at NPR's "Unfit For Work" series and finds it lacking. Lieberman primarily criticizes "Unfit For Work" for suggesting that it's easy to get on Social Security disability benefits. Lieberman writes in conclusion that "Unfit For Work":

... did a disservice to an important safety net crucial to the survival of some of the sickest people around. It could have been a useful service had it explained what disability benefits are — social insurance, not welfare. And that the Social Security program has encountered funding shortfalls 11 times before, and these were always fixed by reallocating payroll tax revenues among the trust funds to account for demographic shifts. As the eight former Social Security commissioners put it in their letter, Social Security actuaries predicted similar action would be needed in 2016, and “they were right on target.”

Calling Social Security

     From the Hartford Courant:

There comes a time in every baby boomer's life when he or she must deal with the Social Security Administration. This is not cause for alarm.

Once you get to speak to a representative, you will find them pleasant and helpful. The trick is getting to a representative. I don't mean to be discouraging, but it is easier to get Barack on the line. ...

There was a time in a bureaucratic galaxy far, far away when you could dial up your local Social Security office and speak to a local human being. Not anymore.

Now, all calls are automatically switched to a central location where an annoying micro-chippie does everything in her power to keep you from speaking with an actual person.

To begin the process you must select a language, be made aware there is a website, and understand that your call may be recorded for training purposes (um, training purposes)?
Does this mean recorded calls are being used to train the computer generated beings answering the phone? I've rather suspected this was the case for a while now. I mean, has anyone else noticed how the micro-chippies are quicker to cop an attitude these days, and even get a little huffy when you swear at them?

Anyway, after the virtual representative is finished aggravating you, she passes you along to another virtual representative who tells you the wait time for a human representative is 15 minutes, or you can call back (this is where the swearing comes in.) ...

Suddenly, there is a real person on the line who will be glad to help but first has a few questions to make sure you are who you say you are.

Age? Address? Social Security number?

How much does your mother-in-law weigh?

What brand of whiskey did your third grade teacher drink at recess? ...

Hearing On Rep Payees

     From a House Ways and Means Committee press release:

U.S. Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, today announced an oversight hearing on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) representative payee program. This hearing will focus on the management challenges of the representative payee program and the agency’s plans for the future, given the aging of the baby boom generation. The hearing will take place on Wednesday, June 5, 2013, in B-318 Rayburn House Office Building beginning at 10 am.

FAIR Says Disability Reporting Isn't Fair

     Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a group that "has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986,"  has a report on the recent surge of media reports purporting to show problems with Social Security's disability programs. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (12/9/12) reported that poor families in Appalachian Kentucky were pulling their kids out of literacy classes. The reason: They feared that if their kids learned to read, it would disqualify them from receiving monthly $698 disability checks from the federal government’s Supplemental Security Income program. ...

According to numerous disability experts, [Kristof's column] was almost entirely wrong or unsupported ...

In a March series, NPR’s Planet Money revisited the world of SSI, this time for adults—and seemed to have learned few of the lessons of the Kristof mess. Calling the program “a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net” and “a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills” (NPR.org, 3/13), NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt painted a picture of soaring disability rolls and nebulous diagnoses, where a “disability industrial complex” is pushing people willy-nilly onto the dole whether they need it or not (All Things Considered, 3/25/13). ...

As with Kristof’s piece, the NPR series led to a firestorm of rebuttals, pointing out significant flaws in the reporting. Media Matters (3/22/13), calling the NPR piece “error-riddled,” cited a Government Accounting Office study (6/26/12) that found disability examiners typically relied on four to five separate medical and school records before making a determination, as well as studies by the Center for American Progress (9/10/12) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (8/05) that found receiving SSI reduced the chances of a family being below the poverty line by 11 percent ...

What has changed is that cutting SSI has become a primary policy target for political think tanks on the right and center (Investor’s Business Daily, 12/17/10; Hamilton Project, 3/29/13). In his piece, Kristof cited as a main source Richard Burkhauser, who said that as a result of SSI, “if you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.” Kristof identified Burkhauser as a “Cornell economist who recently wrote a book on disability programs.”...

That book, The Declining Work and Welfare of People With Disabilities, was in fact published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute—home to Bell Curve author and welfare-reform godfather Charles Murray—which has fixed its sights on disability benefits for several years. Burkhauser is also a resident scholar at AEI, something Kristof never mentioned in his reporting. ...

Burkhauser’s book was also the source of Kristof’s erroneous report that 8 percent of poor children receive SSI—a number that Kristof (NYTimes.com, 1/23/13) later wrote that he factchecked by asking Burkhauser himself, who unsurprisingly confirmed it. (The actual figure, as later calculated by Fremstad—CEPR, 12/20/12—is less than 4 percent.)

NPR’s Joffe-Walt said she was alerted to the growing disability rolls—or as she put it, “14 million people hidden in plain sight”—by Wharton business economist Mark Duggan (All Things Considered, 3/22/13), who has advocated that the disabled be required to rely on private disability insurance for two years before they can switch to the government program (WSJ.com, 11/30/10). She also interviewed both Burkhauser (All Things Considered, 3/28/13) and his co-author Mary Daly (All Things Considered, 3/27/13) without noting their ties to AEI or to each other.

NPR, meanwhile, may have had its own reasons to want to seek out problems with government disability benefits: The Planet Money story was the first under a three-month underwriting deal with Lincoln Financial, a company that sells private disability insurance (to, among other clients, AEI—Daily Kos, 4/25/13)—something that NPR didn’t see fit to mention anywhere in its radio or online coverage.

Can Anyone Explain How This Happened?

     From a television station in Austin, TX:

The KVUE Defenders help a 93-year-old World War II veteran caught in government red tape. A few months ago, the Social Security Administration admitted to Charles Corvill it mistakenly changed the date of his birthday, but refused to correct it.

According to his birth certificate, his birthday is March 2. The agency incorrectly changed it to March 20. ...

Corvill says he noticed the change in his birthday while paying for his prescriptions. He says Medicare stopped making payments because his date of birth didn’t match its records.

“Well, they charged me $300 maximum when they were suppose to charge $150," Corvill said.

So, with a copy of his birth certificate in tow, he visited an Austin Social Security office to correct it.

“And [the agency representative] went around to talk to people in the office and came back and asked if I'd be willing to live with it for a while. I said, 'No way, Jose!'" said Corvill.

In April, Social Security sent him an unsigned form letter stating, “We have reviewed [your birth certificate] that indicates your date of birth is March 2, 1920. But, in the next sentence, it stated "We cannot overturn our original determination that the correct date of birth is March 20th. Please use the date of birth we have already established." ...
Social Security also claimed correcting his date of birth could reduce his monthly benefits. ...

While Corvill 's complaint went nowhere, the KVUE Defenders got results after calling Social Security and Congressman's Lloyd Doggett’s office.

Two weeks later, the agency sent him another unsigned form letter showing it corrected his birthday and wrote, "We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you."