Retirement Benefits Slowdown

      From Bloomberg News:

The rate of growth in retired Americans who collect Social Security has slowed down sharply, and the drop may be due in part to the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid-19 among the elderly.

The number of people who received retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration rose 900,000 to 46.4 million in March, the smallest year-over-year gain since April 2009.

While the Office of the Chief Actuary at the government agency said it is still too early to assess the impact from Covid-19, the year-over-year change appears to reflect excess deaths. About 447,000 people who died from the virus were 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 80% of total deaths. ...

     I'm with the Office of Chief Actuary. Deaths among retirees may not be the only thing going on. Remember that the number of SSI claims filed is down sharply. That is widely attributed to field office closures. There could also be a slowdown in the number of retirement claims filed due to field office closures. We know there's a slowdown in processing people onto benefits after claims are taken which would have the same effect. Also note that the weirdness in the chart in 2001 and 2002 with no Covid-19 to explain it.

SSA Management Slow In Reviewing Union Contracts

      From Government Executive:

Unions at the Social Security Administration reported that the agency’s leadership continues to stall on efforts to reopen contracts negotiated during the Trump administration, three months after President Biden told agencies to do so via executive order and a week after a self-imposed deadline for SSA to review its collective bargaining agreements. ...

In March, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance on how agencies should implement the order, which instructed agencies to reopen union contracts “as soon as is practicable.”

Later that month, following complaints of slow movement by Social Security Administration leadership to implement Biden’s workforce policies, officials at the agency said it was in the midst of a review of all labor contracts and that officials had asked the unions for their input. The self-imposed deadline for that process was April 23.

But a week after that deadline, the labor groups said they have not seen any new action by SSA leadership to reopen old agreements. ...

The Eric Conn Saga Goes On And On

     From the Richmond Register:

A Kentucky judge has ordered court officials to purge hundreds of lawsuits filed against clients by a disgraced disability attorney who masterminded the largest Social Security fraud in history, the Lexington Herald Leader reported.

Eric Conn pleaded guilty in 2017 to bribing doctors to falsify medical records for his thousands of clients and then paying a judge to approve their lifetime disability benefits. His plea agreement would have put him in prison for 12 years, but a few weeks before his sentencing Conn fled the country, leading federal agents on a six-month chase that ended when he was caught outside a Pizza Hut in Honduras. He was sentenced to an additional 15 years for his escape.

Before his downfall, Conn would pay doctors $400 to evaluate clients and then file small-claims lawsuits to recoup the cost, according to the lawsuit.

Pike Circuit Judge Eddy Coleman ruled this week that Conn wasn’t eligible to practice Social Security disability law during the time he was suing clients. Coleman said there were still hundreds of Conn’s small-claims actions on the Pike District Court docket. He ordered the court clerk to purge them all. ...

Does This Come As A Surprise?

      Look nearly all the way down to the next to the bottom circle on this graph, if that's the right term for it. You'll have to click on the image to see it full size and even then you may have to put your face up to your computer screen. What was the second most likely group to donate to Donald Trump -- the disabled. You'd think Republicans would care more about this group.

Independent Agency?

     Mark J. Warshawsky, who was a Trump policy appointee at Social Security but who got forced out when the Biden Administration came in, writes for the Baltimore Sun about SSA's odd "independent agency" status. Surprisingly, I don’t fully disagree with him. The Social Security Administration can never be truly independent. It's too restrained by the budget process and the Office of Management and Budget's veto power over regulations. I think that cabinet status is long overdue for the agency. By a wide measure it's the largest and most consequential of the independent agencies. However, unlike Mr. Warshawsky I believe the Commissioner should serve at the pleasure of the President. A highly partisan figure like Andrew Saul (or Mark Warshawsky) should never be serving at Social Security, much less during an Administration he's at odds with.  Let's end this "independent agency" farce. It hasn't worked.

From The Senate Finance Committee Hearing

      I've watched today's hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. There's certainly a lot of concern about people having to mail their drivers licenses or passports to Social Security. The response from Social Security's witness, Grace Kim, on this issue was basically "We're looking into it" but there was no commitment to do anything different, only to get back to the Committee within two weeks. The problem is that this is just the issue that the Senators are hearing the most about from their constituents but there's a much bigger problem with people who need in-person help filing claims, particularly SSI claims. There's no option for them to get the help they need.

     Kim was asked about when field offices might reopen. Her responses didn't include any sort of timeline. She said Social Security would have to wait on guidance from the White House.

     Kim was asked about negotiations with the employee unions. She said that there were negotiations over the agency's workplace safety plan but not about anything else.  I was surprised that there were not more questions on this. The unions want to redo contracts that were imposed upon them during the Trump Administration.  This would certainly happen if President Biden could appoint a new Social Security Commissioner.

     Here's a couple of tidbits from the written Kim's written statement:

... Limiting visitors has also resulted in an influx of incoming mail and phone calls. To illustrate the magnitude of this increase, before the pandemic, field offices scanned and uploaded about 150,000 paper documents weekly for processing. Offices are currently scanning and uploading approximately one and a half million paper documents weekly. In FY 2020, the unit time for the 47 million field office actions increased by 20 percent in part due to scanning, copying, indexing, and returning mailed documents, which significantly reduced our productivity. ...

Similarly, field offices are now handling three times as many phone calls as they did pre-pandemic. We are on track to answer over 60 million calls in our field offices in FY 2021—up from 20 million calls handled in FY 2019. ...

Senate Finance Committee Hearing Today

      The Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing at 10:00 EDT today on "Social Security During COVID: How the Pandemic Hampered Access to Benefits and Strategies for Improving Service Delivery." It will be possible to watch the hearing online. Grace Kim, Deputy Commissioner for Operations will be the witness for the Social Security Administration.

    One might have expected that the Commissioner would be the witness for Social Security. Leaving aside the question of whether Andrew Saul is legitimately serving as Commissioner, there would be a major problem with him testifying. The hearing would quickly devolve into angry accusations by Democrats that Saul has behaved in an inappropriately partisan fashion as Commissioner followed by spirited counter accusations of something -- I don't know what -- by Republicans. That might be useful in its own way but I expect that it was obvious to all that this only distract from Social Security's current situation.

     I hope to hear detailed information about the agency's dire service delivery problems as well as news about reopening plans. It would be nice if some improvements in relations with employee unions could be announced. It may be too much to hope for but Social Security really needs a supplemental appropriation to help it get through until the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1.

Is This Wrong?

      From National Public Radio:

... Roughly 10% of foster youth in the U.S. are entitled to Social Security benefits, either because their parents have died or because they have a physical or mental disability that would leave them in poverty without financial help. This money — typically more than $700 per month, though survivor benefits vary — is considered their property under federal law.

The Marshall Project and NPR have found that in at least 36 states and Washington, D.C., state foster care agencies comb through their case files to find kids entitled to these benefits, then apply to Social Security to become each child's financial representative, a process permitted by federal regulations. Once approved, the agencies take the money, almost always without notifying the children, their loved ones or lawyers.

At least 10 state foster care agencies hire for-profit companies to obtain millions of dollars in Social Security benefits intended for the most vulnerable children in state care each year, according to a review of hundreds of pages of contract documents. A private firm that Alaska used while Hunter was in state care referred to acquiring benefits from people with disabilities as "a major line of business" in company records. ...

In a Marshall Project/NPR survey of all 50 state child services agencies, most pointed out that it is legal for them to apply to the Social Security Administration to become the financial representative for foster children's benefits — though federal regulations state that a parent, foster parent, relative or family friend is preferred. Almost all said they take kids' money as reimbursement for the cost of foster care, putting the funds in individual accounts to recoup what the state has paid for each child's room and board. ...

The state of Alaska is currently facing a landmark class action lawsuit over this practice that may reach the state Supreme Court later this year. ...

In the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case Washington State v. Keffeler, 39 state attorneys general argued that losing foster children's survivor and disability benefits could potentially cost state governments billions of dollars for years.

Daniel L. Hatcher, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a leading expert on this practice, said it invites a larger question about the role of government. "I think sometimes these officials are so in the weeds of getting funding however they can, they don't even realize that this is not just another funding stream — this is literally children's own money," Hatcher said. "This is about whether we're going to use abused and neglected children's own money to pay for what we're supposed to be providing them as a society." ,,,

What's Up?

      I have written about Social Security failing for over a year to update the numbers it made publicly available on payments of attorney fees. They've finally posted those numbers. However, Social Security has stopped updating a much more important set of numbers, those on the number of disability claims filed and approved. These had been regularly updated each month until the end of 2020. Since then, nothing. As I say, this is a much more important set of numbers, especially now with people wondering about the effects of the pandemic.

     What's up?

400,000 Not Getting The Relief They Deserve

     From Forbes:

Student loan borrower advocacy organizations filed a formal petition today, calling on the Biden administration to grant automatic forgiveness to hundreds of thousands of disabled student loan borrowers who may not even realize that they qualify for a discharge. ...

To be granted a TPD [Total and Permanent Disability] Discharge, however, disabled student loan borrowers must submit a formal application, which can be a cumbersome process, particularly for borrowers who suffer from severe physical and psychological impairments. The Department of Education has authority to automatically grant a TPD Discharge to disabled student loan borrowers who are receiving Social Security Disability benefits, if they have a disability review period of at least five to seven years. The Social Security Administration has identified approximately 400,000 disabled student loan borrowers who would qualify for relief, and the agency has shared that information with the Department of Education. But, the Department has not acted to cancel the student debt balances of these borrowers. Many borrowers do not even realize that they qualify, and most have not submitted applications. ...

The petition calls on the Department to use the information it already has regarding the disabled status of these 400,000 borrowers to automatically forgive their student loan debt. In 2019, the Department was able to implement widespread automatic TPD discharges for borrowers identified by the Veteran’s Administration as totally and permanently disabled due to a service-connected disability. Advocates argue that the Department should enact a similar automated discharge system for borrowers determined to be disabled by the Social Security Administration, as well. ...