Some States Have It Worse Than Others

    From CNBC (go to the link for some nice graphics and lists of all the states):

Many people who have turned to Social Security for help in recent years have found long waits for service.

The pandemic made those delays worse. But the issue actually dates back to before the onset of Covid-19.

Congress has cut Social Security’s core operating budget by 17% since 2010, after adjusting for inflation, according to recent research from the Center on Budget on Policy Priorities. ...

Some states have been more affected by those budget cuts than others, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found.

Social Security’s staff was reduced by 15% between 2010 and 2021. Ten states lost more than 20% of their Social Security staff since 2010. They include Alaska, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Four states — Alaska, Iowa, Virginia and West Virginia — lost more than 25%. The same goes for Puerto Rico. ...

The agency’s Disability Determination Service employees, who decide whether people qualify for either disability or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits, shrank by 16% between 2010 and 2021. Eight states lost more than 30% of their DDS staff, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The states most affected are Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. ...

    Note how many of the worst affected states vote reliably for Republicans who are the ones responsible for the budget problems and thus for the staffing cuts.

OHO Stats

     Posted by Social Security. Click on image to view full size.

You Knew The Stories Were Coming -- Waiting In High Heat Outside SSA Office -- Note That The Reporter Doesn't Quite Get That The Lines Are A National Problem

 

Why Not Look At Both Sides?

     From Incorrect Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance Benefit Payment Computations that Resulted in Overpayments, an audit report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

... SSA makes incorrect benefit computations when employees enter the wrong information into SSA’s systems or incorrectly calculate benefits. Benefits are incorrectly computed when employees or systems base calculations on inaccurate information. When SSA detects an error or obtains accurate information, it corrects the benefits and establishes an overpayment or issues an underpayment. We focused our review on overpayments. ...

We estimate SSA could have avoided approximately 73,000 overpayments totaling more than $368 million if it had effective controls over benefit-computation accuracy. SSA’s controls did not always ensure the Agency calculated benefits accurately. ...

    OK, those overpayments aren't good but what about the other side of the coin. Wasn't Social Security as likely to underpay claimants as overpay them? How many claimants were underpaid and by how much? Isn't that as least as important?

    This report is a microcosm of OIG's priorities and not just under the current Inspector General -- an intense focus on overpayments with only a limited interest in underpayments, which are at least as big a problem.

Markup Of House Appropriations Bill For Social Security

    The Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that has jurisdiction over legislation to fund the administrative operations of the Social Security Administration will markup their share of the FY 2023 appropriations at 5:30 on June 23.

    This may not matter much. Sixty votes are needed to break a filibuster in the Senate. This means that Senate Republicans can, and almost certainly will, prevent passage of a bill until after this November's elections. If things go as now expected, Republicans will control at least the House of Representatives beginning next January. Also, both Republicans and Democrats would each continue to have an effective veto over appropriations in the Senate. The President would continue to have a real veto as well. In other words, this markup session would be very, very important if there were no filibuster in the Senate but there is a filibuster so this markup may have little value other than giving some idea of the priorities that Democrats have. We have some suggestion that Social Security isn't regarded as a priority. The Appropriations Committees have been busy holding hearing concerning appropriations for various agencies including the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Park Service, etc. but no appropriations hearing in either the House or Senate on Social Security.

    By the way, to give you an idea of the process for this markup, the Chair of the Subcommittee, Rosa DeLauro (who is also the Chair of the full Committee), will come up with what is known at the "Chairman's Mark" -- her proposal for what the Subcommittee should do. Members of the Subcommittee can then vote on proposals to modify the Chairman's Mark. The Chairman's Mark isn't released to the public until a few hours before the markup session.

$90,000 Backpay For Widower

      From Business Insider Personal Finance:

Anthony Gonzales and Mark Johnson were married at the Bernalillo County Clerk's Office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, alongside more than 100 other LGBTQ+ couples, on August 27, 2013. 

Same-sex marriage was legalized statewide in New Mexico in December 2013 — and was legalized nationwide on June 26, 2015 by the Supreme Court — however, some local county clerks in New Mexico began issuing marriage licenses to LGBTQ+ couples as early as August 2013, arguing that New Mexico's definition of marriage made no mention of sex or gender. … 

Johnson died on February 19, 2014, six months after he legally married Gonzales at the county clerk's office. … 

When he turned 60 in 2015, one year after Mark's death, Gonzales was let go from his job. He applied for survivor benefits, Social Security benefits that widows and widowers get when their spouse dies. … 

Gonzales was denied survivor benefits three weeks after he sent his application. He says, "I got a letter saying, 'Sorry, but you weren't married the required nine months.' And I was like, 'Well, how could we fulfill that requirement when we could not get married?" … 

In May 2021, the US District Court of Arizona ruled in favor of … same-sex couples who had been denied survivor benefits. According to records reviewed by Insider, Gonzales started receiving $1,700 a month in survivor benefits starting May 2021, along with $90,000 in backpay for the years he was denied benefits. …

Big Jump In DDS Processing Time

    This is the processing time at the Disability Determination Services. I don't think the report specifies but this looks like the initial level processing time.

From Medical Evidence Collection In Adult Social Security Disability Claims, a report to the Social Security Advisory Board

A Tale Of Two Newspapers

    From Rudy Boschwitz writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Social Security is a perennial crisis. Eighty-three percent of Generation X and 77% of millennials say they worry that the program will run out of money in their lifetimes, according to a June 2021 Harris poll for the Nationwide Retirement Institute. The latest report of the Social Security Trustees backs them up, finding that the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund “will be able to pay scheduled benefits on a timely basis until 2034, one year later than reported last year.” That’s only 12 years from now. ...

I’ve updated my reform proposals:

• Raise the full retirement age further. ...

• Raise the early eligibility age. ...

• Change the way benefits are calculated for new recipients. [To cut benefits] ...

• Slow the growth of benefits for new and existing beneficiaries alike by changing the basis on which they’re indexed for inflation.  ...

• Withhold some Social Security COLAs from higher-income retirees. ...

• Give the COLA not annually but every 14 or 15 months using the 12 months of lowest inflation.

• Tax Social Security income for higher-bracket taxpayers, and give them the option to forgo all or part of their monthly payment. ...

• Raise the payroll tax by 0.1% of wages every other year—half from withholding, half for the employer’s contribution—for 20 years, a total tax increase of 1%. ...

    Social Security benefits are already taxed for high income recipients -- at least 85% of the benefits are taxed so that would be only a modest tax increase which would raise only a small amount of money. A rise in the FICA tax by 0.05%? That's hardly a token tax rise. No increase in the wage base. And all these cuts in benefits! That's what passes for a reasonable dialogue at Rupert Murdock's Wall Street Journal.

    From Michael Hiltzik writing for the Los Angeles Times: 

The army of perennial doomsayers about the financial condition of Social Security had to be a little crestfallen after the release of the program trustees’ annual report last week.

That’s because the report documented that the program’s condition had actually improved in the last year, if modestly.

More to the point, the trustees’ data underscored that the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at current levels, or even expanding and improving them, is well within the capacity of the American economy at least to the end of this century, which is as far as the trustees looked. ...

This year, the trustees reckon, Social Security’s combined costs for retirees, those with disabilities and their dependents will come to about 4.98% of an economy valued at $25 trillion. Through the turn of the century, that percentage will peak at 6.18% in 2075, when GDP is estimated to be more than $208 trillion, then will fall to about 5.87% in 2100, when GDP is projected to be $574.5 trillion.

Is this “unaffordable”? Not by international standards. Some of our closest allies in the developed world spend much more than we do on public retirement and disability programs — Japan spends 10.5% of its GDP, France 15.3% and Germany 12.5%. ...

That’s the point of efforts in Congress to expand and increase Social Security benefits, as would be done by a bill dubbed Social Security 2100, introduced by Rep. John B. Larson and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, both Democrats from Connecticut.

The measure would increase benefits across the board by an average 2%, set a minimum retirement benefit at 25% above the federal poverty line and extend dependent benefits for students up to age 26 (the current cutoff is 19), among other improvements.

 On the revenue side, the bill would eliminate, over time, the existing cap on wages subject to tax, which is $147,000 this year — a level that in effect gives the 1% a pass on their obligation to support this universal system. (The payroll tax is 12.4% up to that wage cap, shared equally by employer and employee.) ...

More could be done to provide additional revenue for Social Security. One option would be to make all income, not just wages, subject to the Social Security tax, thus bringing the capital gains and dividends that make up a disproportionate share of income for the wealthiest Americans into the revenue stream.

That option doesn’t get talked about much, perhaps because politicians know that the wealthy would go to the mat to protect their capital gains from higher taxes. ...

    I'm with Hiltzik. The idea that we can't afford an increase in Social Security benefits is nuts. There is no justification for even talking about benefit cuts, especially a plan that talks of huge benefits cuts coupled with the tiniest increase in taxes for the wealthy.

 

 

31% Complete?

     My firm has recently started receiving calls from clients informing us that their My SSA account is showing that work on their case pending at the initial or reconsideration level is 31% or 90% or some other percentage complete. This is nuts. The work at DDS doesn't translate into percentages like this. Where are they coming up with these numbers? Is there any point other than to try to get the claimants to hold off a little longer before they call to ask what's going on with their cases? If so, I don't think this is going to help for long. What are they going to do about claimants whose cases have supposedly been pending at "31% complete" for six months?

A Little Progress But So Far To Go

From Huffpost:

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has won a key Republican ally in his quest to improve one of the most outdated social welfare programs in the United States.

This week, Brown joined forces with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to announce their co-sponsorship of a bill updating the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides benefits to nearly 8 million Americans with disabilities. 

The program pays less than $700 per month for the average recipient meeting its strict eligibility criteria, which include a requirement that recipients have less than $2,000 in their bank accounts. The Brown-Portman measure, called the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, would boost the asset limit from $2,000 to $10,000 for individuals and peg the limit to inflation.  ...

Getting the change into law, however, will be no easy task. Brown attempted unsuccessfully to hitch the measure to a big social spending bill Democrats tried to write last year, but Democrats omitted the proposal even before the bill collapsed. Its $8 billion cost is relatively small, but not exactly chump change, given current attitudes toward spending on Capitol Hill.

Having a Republican on board makes passage a bit more plausible. Brown and Portman said they would try to attach their bill to bigger pieces of legislation Congress may pass in the coming weeks. ...

The Brown-Portman bill would boost the limit to $10,000 for individuals and $20,000 for married couples, eliminating the marriage penalty. Lankford said he would need to see the bill’s text, but that he had been interested in addressing the penalty for years.

Brown has pushed to boost SSI’s meager benefits and limitations on earned income as part of a broader bill but said he would take what he can get in partnership with Portman. ...

    Brown needs not just one but at least ten Republican votes to pass this as a stand-alone bill because of the filibuster in the Senate.  Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for this bill seems limited even among Democrats. I have no idea what bigger piece of legislation may be forthcoming that this could be attached to. I hope there is one. The enthusiasm in the House of Representatives also seems limited. Is the reason the enthusiasm is so limited a perception that since this is a poverty program that it must be primarily something affecting African-Americans? That notion is not only offensive; it's inaccurate. Most people getting SSI are white. However, the awful "welfare queen" prejudices die hard.