A Little Help Needed

     From WSAV:

78-year-old Sheila Conary says it’s been a long seven months in terms of her finances. It started in June of 2019 when she was told by her bank (Wells Fargo) that her account was short.

“I noticed I was getting insufficient funds in my checking account and I thought that can’t be because I’ve got money in there,” Conary told me.

But she was wrong. Four Social Security checks for the months of February, March, April and May had not been electronically deposited as normal. After going to the local Social Security Administration office she was shocked by the information they provided.

“When I went to Social Security they said they couldn’t help me,” said Conary. “They told me I should go to the Bank of America and said my funds had been diverted to an account there, that the change had been set up online by me. I said ‘no I never did that’ and told me I don’t have a Bank of America account.”

She now knows that someone somehow was able to go online to Social Security and change her deposit information. ...

She says seven months later, part of the situation has been resolved, i.e. that as of June her checks went back to her own Wells Fargo account.

“But I’m still missing February, March, April and May (checks) so over $8,000 is still sitting in Bank of America under some account that I didn’t open,” Conary says. ...

     Yes, she should have noticed it earlier but Social Security should have been far more helpful. Why was she initially told Social Security couldn't help her? Why hasn't her money been restored? No, Social Security doesn't have to recover the money before making Ms. Conary whole. This wasn't her fault. Her situation isn't rare. It's happened many thousands of times across the country.

Was Social Security Actually Issuing Decisions On Christmas Day?

     My firm has gotten two or three decisions supposedly issued by Social Security on December 25, 2019. I'd call that a dead giveaway that the dates that the agency puts on decisions are at best an approximation of the date they're actually mailed. I don't think anyone but a few security guards and computer people were working at Social Security that day and no one could have mailed a decision because the mail doesn't run on Christmas day. 

     I think this has to do with centralized printing and mailing. My guess is that the people actually making the decisions just put artificial dates on them assuming they'll be printed and mailed within, let's say, three days after they're ready to go out. Maybe the system does this automatically. Sometimes the printing and mailing people get it out on that date. Sometimes they get it out earlier; sometimes later. Who cares? Claimants have a fixed length of time to file appeals based upon when a decision is mailed. When it comes to appeal rights Social Security takes the dates on its decisions quite literally when it shouldn't

     Why is it that centralized printing and mailing is a good thing anyway?

Why Would An ALJ Do This?

     Why would an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) issue a recommended decision instead of just a decision, as is normal, when there is no basis in Social Security's manual for issuing a recommended decision. The manual says to not do this but I hear that it's not unusual for a few ALJs to do this. What is their thought process? Literally asking for a friend. It's not my case.

"We Don’t Need Fewer Entitlements For The American Middle Class. We Need More."

     From Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, former Treasury Secretary and former economic advisor to President Obama, writing for the Washington Post:

Few economic virtues are more universally applauded than thrift.

Going back at least to Ben Franklin, Americans have equated greater thriftiness with greater worthiness. Progressives decry the limited saving and wealth accumulation of middle-income families ... Conservatives applaud thrift as an aspect of self-reliance and propose ideas such as health-savings accounts to help families prepare for emergencies. Moderates believe universal social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which they label as entitlements, should be modest or even curtailed out of fiscal prudence.

In the current economic context of extremely low interest rates, however, these views are more wrong than right. The federal government should provide more, not less, social insurance. If it did, the result would be reduced inequality, a more secure middle class and a stronger economy.

The real challenges that keep middle-class families up at night are retirement, economic dislocation and supporting their children as they go to college and then buy a first home. These ... are not best met by personal saving. Rather, a generous and well-functioning society in which Social Security meets retirement needs, appropriate unemployment and wage insurance programs cushion economic shocks, adequate public funding holds down college costs, and health insurance has generous coverage would greatly reduce the need for most households to save.

It is highly inefficient to rely on individual saving rather than universal public programs to deal with life’s contingencies. Social Security, for example, pays out close to 99 percent of the revenue it collects in benefits. In contrast, individuals saving for retirement or the proverbial rainy day can over a lifetime dissipate as much as 20 percent of their savings in commission payments to financial institutions. Similar, and probably greater, efficiencies are associated with government provision of other forms of insurance.

There is the further point that self-reliance is an especially implausible way to deal with catastrophes such as disability or the loss of a good-paying job without the availability of an alternative. Genuinely preparing for such contingencies would involve building up a large nest egg at a substantial cost in terms of current consumption. Meanwhile, the feared contingencies never arise for most people. That’s why pooling risk through insurance is the best strategy. ...

We don’t need fewer entitlements for the American middle class. We need more.

Problems With Government Issued Debit Card Leave Many Without Access To Social Security Benefits -- And Notice How Long This Elderly Woman Had To Spend At A Social Security Office Trying To Get The Problem Resolved

     From CBS Chicago (emphasis added):

An 80-year-old Chicago woman is still fighting to access her Social Security money days after CBS 2 first got involved. It is because of debit card problems that CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov reported Monday are plaguing people across the country.

Ida Walker was frail and exhausted as she left a Social Security office on Monday. On Friday, a Social Security Administration employee told Walker to go in person – so as finally to solve a problem she has had with her U.S. Direct Express debit card, which is linked to her Social Security funds.

Walker spent three hours in the Social Security office on Monday. ...

She and her granddaughter have spent three weeks calling the U.S. Direct Express to activate a replacement card – only to get the runaround.

It meant she was cut off from her funds....

Based on the response we got to our initial story about Ida Walker’s frustrating attempts to access her Social Security funds and activate her Direct Express card, hers is not an isolated case.

Kozlov heard from a dozen people, by phone and email, who have the same problem.

“A Direct Express nightmare across the country,” one person wrote. Another reported that they lost hope.  ...

We’ve learned the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service renewed its contract with Comerica Bank in 2015, with that contract set to expire last week.

The contract’s cost to taxpayers, according to a Treasury Inspector General audit, is $38 million to $42 million. ...

Walker’s granddaughter said they talked to a Comerica employee Monday evening, who said the problem is finally being resolved. A representative blamed the matter on a fraud protection trigger.

Social Security Fraud Pays For A Silver Bentley

     There are two stories today.

     First, Rowena Isabel Lokeni of Orange County, California has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. Lokeni had fraudently diverted $176,015 in Social Security benefits to herself while working for the Social Security Administration.

     Here's the second story, from FA Online:

On Youtube, the happy-go-lucky family that goes by the name B.E.A.M. Squad seems to have everything—1.3 million subscribers, a sprawling Palm Beach, Fla. home, exotic travel and a silver Bentley—but they also have a dark, criminal past: According to a 2019 plea deal with the Social Security Administration, they were indicted and arrested for multiple felonies which included stealing Social Security money and filing phony tax returns.

Losses to the SSA and the Internal Revenue Service totaled almost $94,000, court documents show.

Billy Altidor, 29, and Evanie (Eva) Louis, 27, admit that in 2014 and 2015, they stole Social Security benefits owed people old enough to be their grandparents, according to their plea deal. A third defendant is awaiting trial.

The defendants accessed, or attempted to access, My Social Security online accounts belonging to more than 1,400 people, prosecutors said. ...

Union Leader Castigates Saul

     From an op ed in the Baltimore Sun by Ralph de Juliis, head of the union local that represents most Social Security employees:

... While the president has blustered and obfuscated through his first term, Trump-appointed Cabinet officials have waged a war on the federal workforce that has undermined our productivity, driven down morale and villainized the very employees who show up every day to serve the American people. ...  

Now under threat is the Social Security Administration thanks to administration decisions that will ultimately harm employees and drive up wait times for Social Security recipients under the guise of good public relations. Social Security Administrator Commissioner Andrew Saul announced that the agency would extend office hours to the public on Wednesday afternoons in more than 1,100 field offices around the country. He followed this announcement with a promise to hire 1,100 new employees, claiming that the new hires would directly impact the efficacy of our field offices. ...

But this fallacy falls apart when one takes a closer look. Only a fraction of those new hires will go toward telecommunications centers, and none to the field offices, which are already severely understaffed. On top of that, the Social Security Administration has experienced a yearly attrition rate of nearly 4,000 employees over the past four years, meaning the hiring numbers that are promised aren’t exactly what they seem. The most insidious part of Commissioner Saul’s announcement is the fact that he has placed a hiring freeze on the agency, which is still in effect, preventing the agency from replacing the workforce we’ve lost to the private sector, retirement or other opportunities.

Our field offices had coped with this staff shortage by setting aside time on Wednesday afternoons for employees to address and finish open claims. By opening up these hours to the public, employees will be inundated by new cases, increasing the backlog and elongating wait times for the American public. While Commissioner Saul takes a victory lap, public servants around the country only see their workload increasing. The result is worker morale plummeting by the day. ...

Social Security employees deserve a leadership that understands the issues we face and is dedicated to our mission to provide the best possible service to the American people. That leadership doesn’t exist in Commissioner Saul. That’s why we call on Congress to hold hearings on the agency under Commissioner Saul’s tenure, reopen our contract, and bring the Social Security Administration back to the bargaining table.

     It's not just me asking why the House Social Security Subcommittee hasn't held even one oversight hearing in this Congress.

An Inflection Point? Maybe We'll Know In Another Year Or Two Or Three

     Social Security has released updated statistics showing that the number of disability claims filed in calendar year 2019 was essentially the same as in 2018. This is a big change. In every year between 2011 and 2018 the number of new claims declined significantly, totaling a 32% decline over these years. Could this be an inflection point? It may be years until we know for sure.

      You have to be careful in reading Social Security's table. First, two numbers are presented on number of claims filed, Field Office Receipts and Initial DDS Receipts. Field Office Receipts include many claims that were quickly denied on technical grounds such as the claimant failing to meet the earnings requirement. Changes in agency practices as well as the spread of internet filing of claims affect the number of technical denials. I think the Field Office Receipts numbers should be ignored. The Initial DDS Receipts numbers are the important ones. These are the cases that are actually adjudicated on the merits. Second, pay close attention to the footnotes which contain this caution: 

Because the application data are tabulated on a weekly basis, some months include 5 weeks of data while others include only 4 weeks. This weekly method of tabulation accounts for much of the month-to-month variation in the monthly application data. This method also occasionally causes quarterly data to have either 12 or 14 weeks of data instead of 13 weeks, annual data may include an extra week of data.

This means that there's no point in paying attention to the monthly or even quarterly numbers. Even the yearly numbers may be a little distorted by having one week more or less than the prior year. Thus, even though the Initial DDS Receipts were recorded as being up by 9,195 in 2019 over 2018, I think it would be more accurate to say that there was almost no change from 2018 to 2019 since we don't know how many weeks were used for either 2018 or 2019. 

     Here's Social Security's graph of the data, which does suggest to me an inflection point but maybe that's what I want to see. Maybe the 2019 data will turn out to have been nothing more than a blip:

Another Social Security Employee Speaks Out

     A letter to the editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:

Recently, Commissioner of the Social Security Administration Andrew Saul announced that offices would be open all day on Wednesdays nationwide. Currently, offices are closed on Wednesday afternoons.  

I have worked for Social Security for 18 years and currently work in a local field office. There will be consequences to this new policy that Saul did not disclose. Local workloads will increase. Staff currently use Wednesday afternoons to reduce workloads. That time will now be spent taking in more work with even less time to process it. Processing times will increase as the workloads increase.  

Social Security staff take our service to the public seriously, and we want to do the best job we can. However, as workloads continue to increase, so does the pressure to process the work more quickly in less time. There will be a significant increase in employees who retire or leave as a result of the added stress. The majority of employees who leave are usually not replaced and it takes years for new employees to become proficient because of the complex and technical nature of the job. The employees who remain are even more stressed and the cycle continues. 

The problem started when the agency made the poor decision to cut staffing when workloads increased as baby boomers aged. The problem will continue until the agency decides to hire enough frontline employees for us to be able to do our jobs correctly and provide the level of service the public deserves. With enough staffing, we could be open all day on Wednesday and allow time for employees to process work in a timely manner.

I feel the work I do is important, and I want to provide the best service to the American public. However, Saul is implementing a policy that will make my job more difficult and ultimately affect the service to the American public. 

Karime Masson

Might Be Useful

     Social Security has posted a list of telephone numbers for all of its field offices as of October 29, 2019.