This Matters Far More Than Some Stupid WSJ Op Ed

     Is it easier to win a World Series than to get on Social Security disability?

Number Drawing Disability Benefits Declines For Fifth Straight Month

     The number of people drawing Social Security disability benefits declined in February. This is the fifth straight month of decline. I think we have a trend.

Does Social Security Have A Policy On This?

     The Social Security Administration allows electronic signatures on its Form SSA-827, "Authorization To Disclose Information To The Social Security Administration." The agency allows most claims and appeals to be filed online. What about Form SSA-1696, "Appointment of Representative." What about fee agreements between attorneys and their clients? Does Social Security have a policy on acceptance of electronic signatures on these forms? Are "wet" signatures still required?

Age 112 And Still Not Dead On Social Security's Books

     From a recent audit report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

SSA did not have controls in place to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased. To illustrate, we identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older who did not have death information on the Numident. 

     This report is drawing attention from Congress and the media.
     The important thing to note is that Social Security isn't paying benefits to these deceased numberholders. There are a few people who are supposedly 112 or older who are receiving benefits but these are mostly due to errors in inputting date of birth, that is the people are actually younger than 112. For instance, somebody input 2/2/01 when they meant to input 2/2/91. There are a few other people receiving benefits on an incorrect account due to transposition errors in inputting their Social Security number when they applied for benefits. These folks are as likely to be underpaid as overpaid. These cases are only a very minor problem.
     OIG's point is that the Social Security numbers of people who are dead are sometimes used for identity fraud that doesn't involve Social Security benefits. This leads back to Social Security's longstanding complaint that it's set up to issue benefits to those who are entitled to benefits, not to administer a de facto national identification system. 

     It may be tempting to say that Social Security ought to declare dead everyone identified in their database as 112 or older but Social Security already knows that it has an incorrect date of birth for many people. It just doesn't know which people. Declaring someone dead when they are alive creates major problems. That already happens way too often. Declaring everyone dead who is down in Social Security's records as being 112 or older will lead to howls of outrage from thousands of people who would wrongly be declared dead and whose lives would be badly disrupted. It's not just Social Security. Other government agencies and financial institutions rely upon Social Security's Death Master File.
     OIG has a legitimate interest in preventing fraud, whether it's fraud on the Social Security Administration or identity fraud involving a Social Security number. However, OIG seems unconcerned with the problem of collateral damage to innocent people from overaggressive efforts to prevent fraud.

Hit Piece In The WSJ

     The Wall Street Journal has an op ed piece titled "Disability Claim Denied? Find The Right Judge." It's behind a pay wall. I'll just extract a few phrases and sentences to give readers the flavor of the piece:

• "morphed into a benefit bonanza that costs taxpayers billions of dollars more than it should"
• "judicial impartiality has declined significantly"
• "Congress should also institute 15-year term limits for judges"
• "Congress can limit this gamesmanship by allowing only one application per claimant in a three-year period."
• "Decades ago workers ages 50 or 55 might have been considered retiring, but this is no longer generally the case. Novel job-training programs also make it easier than ever for workers to move into new fields and make up for low levels of education, and new disability criteria would account for these changes."  
  

     Michael Hiltzik takes down some of the nonsense in this piece but there's so much more. I'll limit myself to one sentence in the piece. What are these "novel job-training programs" that make it easier for handicapped people to move into different fields? I have no idea what he's talking about. Older people are less adaptable. That's just a fact of human existence. There's no program, old or new, that can change that. Making up for low levels of education? Adult basic education has been around for a very long time for those who are able to take advantage of it. The problem, however, is that the most common reason for people having low educational attainments is that they have limited cognitive abilities. That's an unpleasant truth that both liberals and conservatives prefer not to talk about. Sure, the limited cognitive abilities often have their genesis in childhood poverty but limited cognitive abilities are largely irreparable regardless of their cause. I'd be happy to substitute IQ tests for educational attainments in disability determination.

Not Many Rejected Disability Applicants Go Back To Work

From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

A Poll

Free Web poll for your Web site - freepolls.com

This Should Be Fun

     From The Hill:

Republicans in the House and Senate plan to release separate budget blueprints this month, creating the potential for conflict as they head into a new fiscal battle with President Obama. ...

Details about what will be in the budget plans are scarce, but Republicans have stressed the need to cut the deficit and bring the budget “within balance,” which will require steep cuts to domestic programs and potentially changes to Social Security and Medicare.

The Octopus

     From an op ed by Daniel Hatcher in the Baltimore Sun:

Our state foster care agencies [in Maryland] are apparently so underfunded that they are taking resources from abused and neglected children. The agencies are taking control over foster children's Social Security benefits (when the children are disabled or have deceased parents) and using the children's funds to repay foster care costs. In other words, Maryland is requiring the children to pay for their own care. ...

It's almost out of a Charles Dickens novel — forcing orphaned and disabled foster children to pay for their own care. Other states have engaged in this practice regarding Social Security benefits, but the fact that other states may be engaged in bad policies does not make it OK for Maryland. ... 

There's more: Maryland hired a private company last year — Maximus, Inc. — to provide an assessment for how the state can obtain more resources from foster children and, according to Maximus' report, "maximize revenue gain"; the report describes foster children as a "revenue generating mechanism." The Maryland Department of Human Resources contracted with Maximums despite litigation regarding the practice and a finding by the Maryland Court of Appeals that the agency violated foster children's due process rights by providing no notice to the children or their lawyers. Maryland foster care agencies are significantly underfunded. But taking resources from the very children the agencies exist to serve is not the answer. ...

      Maximus is a major contractor for the Social Security Administration. They also represent claimants before Social Security. They've just gotten a contract to do disability determinations for the social security system in the United Kingdom! Did I miss anything?

Improved Video Hearing Picture Quality

     I don't know how widespread this is but in Eastern North Carolina, Social Security's Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) has installed new equipment for video hearings which significantly improves picture quality. The new equipment doesn't take us to true hi-def. I'd say it improves picture quality from circa 1954 (or perhaps 1944) to circa 1990, which is a major improvement.

This Is Lame

     The Social Security Administration has a website that promises information about office closings updated "every 10 minutes." This is what it says right now:

Due to severe weather conditions impacting the Mid-Atlantic and other parts of the country, offices in New Jersey, Maryland, Washington D.C., Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and Dallas, Texas are closed or had delayed openings today, March 5, 2015. Please check with your local Social Security office to find out about office delays and closings in your local area.

     Why does this website promise something it doesn't come close to delivering? If you're a claimant or someone like myself who does business with the agency, what do you do? You try calling the local office but you can't get through which means nothing because you usually can't get through. You have no idea whether you're supposed to go ahead with whatever you have scheduled with the agency. During the last set of weather closings in my area, attorneys drove over an hour each way to attend hearings that weren't held!
     My advice is that Social Security should take down this website until it's ready to deliver on its promise of frequently updated information on office closings. This should be doable.

I Think This Is New

     An example added recently to Social Security's Program Operations Manual Series (POMS):

A 50-year-old claimant with a high school education and unskilled past relevant work has an RFC [Residual Functional Capacity] for standing/walking 2 hours of an 8-hour day and sitting approximately 6 hours of an 8-hour day. He is able to lift/carry/push/pull 20 pounds occasionally and 10 pounds frequently. This RFC falls between rule 201.12, which has a decision of disabled, and 202.13, which has a decision of not disabled. In this case, use rule 201.12 as a framework for a decision of disabled because the definitions in DI 25001.001 (Medical-Vocational Quick Reference Guide) indicate light work usually requires walking or standing for approximately 6 hours of an 8-hour day. Since the claimant can only walk or stand for 2 hours, he has a significantly reduced capacity to perform light work and a sedentary medical-vocational rule applies as a framework for a determination.

Workers Comp Cuts Costing Social Security

     From Linda DePillis writing for the Washington Post's Wonkblog:

There’s a good news/bad news situation for occupational injuries in the United States: Fewer people are getting hurt on the job. But those who do are getting less help. ...

“The cutbacks [in workers compensation] have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty,” write authors Henry Grabell and Howard Berkes. “Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and basic help their doctors recommend.” ...

Somebody ends up paying for those injuries, though: taxpayers. When a worker ends up unable to work because of an injury, he or she can be covered by Social Security Disability Insurance, a program that has steadily increased in cost over the past two decades. The rise has many demographic factors behind it, but it looks like the abdication of responsibility by employers may have played a role as well.

Average Retirement Age Has Gone Up

From a report by Alicia Munnell of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

This Is How Some Overpayments Happen

     Social Security has created a "Work Site",  a website that's supposed to encourage return to work but it includes no information on how a disability recipient is supposed to notify the agency if he or she has returned to work. You're supposed to call the agency's 800 number but given the wait time on those calls, many claimants get frustrated and give up.  

     I looked into this because I just had a former client tell me he had called to tell Social Security that he had returned to work part time. He was told that since he was only earning $800 a month that it would be no problem. He received no written receipt of his report of return to work even though he called twice. That's wrong. He should have gotten a written receipt, especially since his Trial Work Period has now begun. There's no lower limit on earnings that are supposed to trigger the issuance of a written receipt.

New Procedure For Some Blindness Cases

     Social Security has finally devised a procedure for dealing with claimants who are working and who allege that they have become statutorily blind while already on disability benefits without regard to blindness. Different standards apply to work activity in blindness cases. I had a case like this some years ago. Everyone conceded that a different standard applied to those who are statutorily blind but they kept saying that my client hadn't been adjudicated statutorily blind so they couldn't apply that standard even though we kept presenting evidence that she had become statutorily blind. At the time they had no procedure for adjudicating blindness after a person had already been found disabled for other reasons. Eventually, we got the sort of resolution indicated in this new procedure but it took a couple of years.

Guilty Plea In New York

     From the New York Times:

A Long Island lawyer who led a huge scheme to defraud the Social Security Administration pleaded guilty on Friday, receiving a reduced sentence in return for promising to help federal investigators find other people cheating the disability insurance system, prosecutors said.  ...

He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years on the top charge of grand larceny, had he gone to trial. In return for his assistance, he was promised a sentence of one year in jail ...

What's In A Name?

     The Institute of Medicine is recommending that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), be renamed as Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease because "the term “chronic fatigue syndrome” can result in stigmatization and trivialization." CFS leads to a fari number of Social Security disability claims. I doubt that a new name is going to reduce the stigma problem. 

     Below are the diagnostic criteria proposed by the IOM panel -- and note that the panel still refers to "CFS/ME" even as they recommend a new name!

If These Are Your Best Arguments, You're In Trouble

     Andrew Biggs, who was Deputy Commissioner of Social Security during part of the George W. Bush Administration, has written an article for the National Review giving reasons why the cap on wages covered by the F.I.C.A. tax that supports Social Security shouldn't be raised. Here are the arguments and my take on them:

• There's always been a cap on wages covered by F.I.C.A. So what? Full retirement age used to be 65. It's now 66 and heading to 67. Biggs would undoubtedly prefer it be raised to 70, if not 80. He's being selective about what changes he opposes. We have to change something.
• The cap is necessary so that Social Security won't be considered a "welfare" program. That's rich coming from Biggs who wants to means test Social Security. Why would increasing the wage cap make Social Security into a "welfare" program anyway? And what's wrong with programs devoted to improving the welfare of the American people?
• Raising the cap wouldn't solve the entire long term Social Security funding problem. No one proposal will. Biggs has no one solution for Social Security's long term funding problems. He favors a series of massive benefits cuts. Why does one proposal have to solve the entire problem?
• We ought to solve the problem of rising health care costs before we do anything about Social Security. What does that have to do with the F.I.C.A. cap? Anyway, Biggs undoubtedly opposes the Affordable Care Act which is actually doing something about health care costs.
• Most other countries have wage caps on the their Social Security taxes. Why is that important? I thought the right was big on American exceptionalism.
• It's a big tax increase. It will make U.S. tax rates higher than those is Scandinavia. It's a tax increase only for the wealthiest Americans, a group that has fared extremely well in recent years while the rest of the country has fared poorly. The wealthy can afford it. On Scandinavian tax rates, Biggs is citing income tax rates that don't include Social Security charges. Here's what I'm finding as the maximum tax rates in Scandinavia: Denmark 61%, Finland 61.96%, Norway 47.2%, Sweden 57%. I think we'd be well below those rates even if we remove the wage cap. Besides, Scandinavians have a high standard of living and much better social security than the U.S.. Why should we fear that?
• When we fix Medicare and Medicaid tax rates are going to go up. Glad to hear that Biggs supports higher taxes to support Medicare and Medicaid but how is that relevant to this discussion?
• An economic study shows that a rise in the wage cap won't generate as much revenue as predicted. That's not exactly what the study cited by Biggs says. In fact, the study makes no bold prediction about the effect of an increase in the wage cap. It suggests more study which is always the way with these studies. If anything, the study suggests the opposite of what Biggs is representing it to say. Anyway, here's what the report actually said so you can judge for yourself, if you can stay awake as you read it: "We have eight main findings. First, the workers who would experience an increase in marginal tax rates from an increase in the taxable maximum are mostly married males – a group thought to have relatively small elasticities. There are, however, a significant number of self-employed workers among this population which could suggest somewhat higher responsiveness. Second, the recent empirical evidence showing large behavioral responses to taxation is largely irrelevant to this question as it mostly focuses on broader concepts of income for which elasticities are likely to be higher and on demographic groups such as wives of high earners that are not particularly common in the subset of the population whose incentives would be altered by an increase in the taxable maximum. In the few studies that have also focused on narrower concepts, elasticities fall dramatically when the tax base is something closer to earnings. Third, the earnings distribution of workers around the current taxable maximum is inconsistent with a model in which people are highly responsive to the payroll tax rate. Fourth, this is true even for the self-employed, a group that is often thought to have significant control over its reported earnings. Fifth, in panel data on high-earnings married men, we see a tremendous increase in earnings over the 1980s and 1990s, but no break in the trend around the TRA86 or OBRA93 tax acts. Sixth, the rise in earnings for the high earners is so much greater than for other income groups that it seems completely implausible that the other income groups could serve as reasonable control groups for the high earners. Seventh, the overall weight of our evidence does not support the Eissa (1995) finding of a large behavioral response to taxation by wives of high earners. Eighth, we think there remains considerable uncertainty about the relevant elasticities for high earners – uncertainty that will be very difficult to eliminate without much larger samples of such taxpayers than are available outside the U.S. Treasury. Our policy simulations suggest that with an earnings elasticity of 0.5, lost income tax revenue and increased deadweight loss would swamp any benefits from the increase in payroll tax revenue. In contrast, with an elasticity of 0.2, the ratio of the gain in OASDI revenue to lost income tax revenue and deadweight loss would be much greater. Thus, knowing whether the elasticity is closer to 0.2 (or below) versus 0.5 is critical to deciding on whether this would be a wise policy."

Online Social Security Card Replacement Coming

     From today's Federal Register:

We propose to revise our regulations to allow applicants for a Social Security number (SSN) card to apply by completing a prescribed application and submitting the required evidence, rather than completing a paper Form SS-5, Application for a Social Security Card. We also propose to remove the word ``documentary'' from our description of certain evidence requirements. These changes would provide flexibility in the ways in which the public may request SSN cards and allow us, in the future, to implement an online SSN replacement card application system, which we are currently developing.

    Can this be done securely?