"I've Never Had Such A Hard Time Giving Back Money"

     From KUTV:

Sue Brandon got a huge surprise when she checked her bank account one day. She had received a Social Security deposit of $13,098.

The massive amount is a far cry from the $4 per month increase that the Social Security Administration had told her she would be getting after her husband passed away.

“I called them and said, ‘Hey, something's wrong because there's no way you can owe me this $13,000,’” she said. ...

Brandon said she called the Social Security office over and over again but was repeatedly old they couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

The Brandon said one of the SSA employees snapped at her: “I don't know what to tell you anymore. Call your congressman.” ...

"I've never had such a hard time giving back money,” she said. ...

      I think I've posted before about the problem I and other attorneys sometimes have when an attorney fee is overpaid. We issue a check refunding the money to Social Security but the agency immediately issues another check in the same amount. I recently talked with another attorney who was refunding the same fee overpayment for the fourth time!

Eric Conn "Better Surrender Before Monday"

     From the Lexington Herald-Dispatch:

... Scott White, Conn's attorney, repeated his call for Conn to surrender to authorities, and said the FBI was "ramping up" efforts to capture him. 

"That could well mean that he is about to be charged with a separate crime," White said in an email Friday. "And if that happens, my ability to restrict the consequences to a bond violation is seriously jeopardized. In that case, the number of years he is facing in prison will dramatically increase. In other words, it sounds like he better surrender before Monday." ...

Washington Post's Reporting Draws Criticism

     The Washington Post's reporting on Social Security disability continues to draw criticism from many quarters for being "mean spirited" and "cartoonish." I think the Post just keeps listening to right wing "think tanks" who are only too happy to caricature poor sick people. It's easy to write articles like the Post has published if you are so far removed from the people you are writing about that you can only think about them as stereotypes.

A New Obsession

New Evidence In Conn Case?

     From some television station in Kentucky that hides its call letters on its website:

After a raid at the law offices of Eric C. Conn turned up new evidence for federal investigators, the FBI will hold a press conference on the embattled attorney's disappearance. ...

The FBI will hold the press conference at their Louisville offices at 10 a.m.

    Update: Apparently, there wasn't much news coming out of that news conference.

Where's The Budget?

     From CQ News (sorry, I don't have a link):

The White House did not include a required Social Security Administration request in President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget —and lawmakers are waiting to find out why.

The Senate Finance Committee wrote a bipartisan letter to White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney on June 1 asking for the administration to release what is called the Social Security commissioner’s “unrevised” administrative budget.

Under a 1994 law (PL 103-296) that made the Social Security Administration an independent agency, the president is required to include the commissioner’s administrative request in the full budget....

“We have not yet received an official response, but understand OMB is working on it,” a GOP aide to the Finance Committee told CQ. ...

The Finance Committee letter says the requirement for the president to make the Social Security budget request public is a “key feature of the Act that made Social Security independent.” ...

In the case of Social Security, the president’s budget is supposed to include both the Social Security’s Administration’s request to the president, and what the president is requesting from Congress....

Another Conviction In Conn Scandal

     From the Floyd County Times:

A federal jury in Lexington Tuesday convicted a clinical psychologist for his role in a Social Security disability fraud scheme that included a former Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative law judge and that involved the submission of thousands of falsified medical documents to the SSA, obligating the SSA to pay more than $600 million in lifetime benefits to claimants predicated on these fraudulent submissions. ...

After a one-week trial in federal court in Lexington, the jury convicted Alfred Bradley Adkins, 45, of Shelbiana, of one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, one count of mail fraud, one count of wire fraud, and one count of making false statements. ...

Lawsuit On Student Loan Debt Collection

     From the New York Daily News:

The feds are ripping off disabled Social Security recipients by skimming their benefits in order to pay back defaulted student loans — but not saying enough on what people can do to avoid it, a lawsuit alleges.

“Instead of focusing on getting disabled borrowers the relief they are entitled to under federal law,” the suit says, the Department of Education uses debt collection methods like the Social Security disability benefit offset “to collect money from disabled borrowers.” ...

The plaintiffs say their benefits are getting trimmed by loan debt that could be forgiven “if the defendants simply told them about the existence of the disability-based discharge.” ...

The suit wants Social Security recipients to get a better notice about the availability of the disability discharge and better government tracking so disabled recipients don’t get a lopped-off payment in the first place. ...

A Tawdry Scheme

     From the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram and Gazette:

A city man who worked administering federal Social Security benefits in Worcester pleaded guilty to a bribery charge Friday in connection to allegations he orchestrated thousands in overpayments to claimants for personal gain. ...

According to an affidavit filed in federal court by Tawnya Patterson, a criminal investigator with the Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration, the alleged activity occurred between August of 2016 and Sept. 2016. The case for which he was charged involved an $8,600 payment that a specific claimant did not deserve — a payment he facilitated, the records show, by creating false documents in exchange for $2,000. ...

Mr. Klapper, she alleged, processed multiple changes to accounts for disabled children who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), “to which the claimants were not entitled.

“In total, Klapper was believed to have changed SSI records a total of 22 times for seven beneficiaries, resulting in underpayments of less than $5,000 each time being due to the claimants,” she wrote.

The case that resulted in the bribery charge included requests for sexual pictures and implied sexual acts, the records show, before Mr. Klapper ultimately accepted $2,000. ...

Caseload Analysis Report

     Posted in the newsletter of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR), which is not available online.

Click on this to view full size

     Note the large increase in overtime hours beginning in February. Note also that the Senior Attorney decisions are down to a pathetic total of 18 in April! If you want to know whether Social Security is taking its hearing backlog seriously, pay attention to the Senior Attorney decisions. Should Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in 2018, expect that number to soar.