New Upload Documents Service

     From Emergency Message EM-23041 issued yesterday:

This Emergency Message (EM) notifies technicians of a new online service option called Upload Documents that customers can use to electronically submit certain technician-requested evidence and forms. Technicians will initiate the request through the Technician Experience Dashboard (TED). ...

We will release Upload Documents on July 8, 2023. The initial rollout will be limited to the Boston Region offices using TED.

Upload Documents can be used to serve Title II, Title XVI, and Title XVIII beneficiaries, as well as individuals who do not currently receive benefits from SSA.

Initially, technicians will be able to use Upload Documents to request a small number of forms that do not require a signature (Section F). During release 2, we will update Upload Documents to include additional forms, including some forms requiring a signature. Customers will be able to sign and submit these forms using Upload Documents’ electronic signature (“eSignature”) functionality. We will discuss the eSignature process for Upload Documents in a future EM.

Upload Documents will also allow technicians to request certain pieces of evidence. ...

... TED is a new technician-driven SSA interface that will help modernize and streamline our interactions with customers.

When a technician determines that SSA needs a certain form and/or evidence that is on the list of items currently accepted for Upload Documents, the technician can initiate the request using TED. Before initiating the request, the technician will first contact the customer regarding the request, offering the use of Upload Documents. If the customer is interested in using Upload Documents to submit the requested evidence or form, the technician will obtain the customer's consent to receive a one-time email from SSA, containing an access link and instructions for Upload Documents. The technician will be able to view a customer’s previously registered mySSA email address, where applicable. The customer can choose to receive the one-time Upload Documents email at the previously registered email address, or at a different email address. If the customer consents to receive a one-time Upload Documents email, the technician should verify the customer’s preferred email address. The technician will then select the forms and evidence that are needed from the customer within TED (see screenshot below). ...

    It says something, doesn't it, that this is named for the "technician experience" rather than the claimant or customer experience.

    Are they still going to insist on calling the claimant to ask "Is this really your signature?", which defeats the whole point of using an online system for uploading documents? I wonder how often claimants say "No, I didn't sign that." Maybe, never. You have to be careful but you don't have to be paranoid.

If Congress Wants Better Service At Social Security, It Needs To Give The Agency A Greater Operating Budget

     From the testimony of Chad M. Poist, Deputy Commissioner for Budget, Finance, and Management, Social Security Administration, before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce

Click on image to view full size

 

Age At Which Workers Claim Social Security Retirement Benefits

      From The Motley Fool:

• Age 62: 29.3%
• Age 63: 7.4%
• Age 64: 8%
• Age 65: 12.7%
• Age 66: 24.7%
• Age 67: 3.9%
• Age 68: 2.3%
• Age 69: 2.1%
• Age 70 (or above): 9.6%

Dropped Calls

    From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

 

A 25% Reduction In Social Security's Operating Budget?

     The House Appropriations Committee has voted along party lines for Subcommittee allocations, that is the amount that each Subcommittee will have to allocate among the agencies within its purview. This is for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 appropriations bills. As the Consortium for Constituents with Disabilities (CCD) points out, the allocation for the Labor-HHS Subcommittee which has responsibility for the Social Security Administration's Limitation on Administrative Expenditures (LAE), the equivalent of an appropriation for an agency that takes its money from a trust fund, is 25% below the current FY. The Subcommittee can then allocate the pain among the agencies covered by the Labor-HHS appropriation bill.

    As you may recall, the President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives earlier agreed to overall budget limits that were only a little below the current fiscal year. So why is the Labor-HHS allocation so low? The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives decided that they weren't bound by their agreement with the President.

    A 25% reduction in Social Security's operating budget would mean massive RIFS at Social Security and an almost completely non-functional agency -- an unmanageable situation.

    It is far from clear that the House of Representatives could pass an FY 2024 Labor-HHS appropriation bill that is 25% lower than the current fiscal year. It certainly couldn't pass the Senate or receive the President's signature. So they would negotiate, right? The President has little incentive to negotiate with leaders who refuse to be bound by agreements they have made.

    We may be heading towards a year long Continuing Resolution (CR), which means that Social Security could spend money at the same rate as in FY 2023. There are worse things that could happen.

Catch 22

     Let's say you're developmentally disabled, meaning you've been disabled from birth. You start drawing SSI as a child due to your disability. You become 18 and Social Security does a review to see whether you're disabled under the adult standard and they decide you are. Then, a parent dies or goes on Social Security benefits when you're 21. That potentially entitles you to Disabled Adult Child (DAC) benefits on your parent's Social Security number since you became disabled before age 22. Shouldn't Social Security just put you on the DAC automatically? You've already been found disabled under the same standard. Under a new addition to Social Security's POMS manual, the answer is not so fast. They first want to make sure they can't find a way to cut you off the SSI benefits you're already drawing. So, if you're the claimant aren't you a little afraid you're going to lose your sole means of support if you file that DAC claim? But, if you don't file the DAC claim, you may lose your SSI because you refused to avail yourself of means of support other than SSI. Nice Catch 22 they've set up for you. That's what all this fancy talk about collateral estoppel is about, finding ways to cut claimants off benefits, or, really, finding ways to avoid collateral estoppel since that doctrine should help the claimant in this situation.

Happy July 4th!

 

Recognize the location?

Average Speed Of Telephone Answer

     From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Click on image to view full size. Yes, it’s a confusing way to present the data. What were they thinking?

 

Complaints About Charges For SSN Verification

     From Federal News Network:

A federal service used by financial institutions to verify Social Security numbers, recently highlighted as a prime example for how the government could reduce improper payments and fraud, is at risk of a “death spiral” due to a steep increase in user fees, according to proponents of the system.

The Government Accountability Office is now conducting a review of the Social Security Administration’s electronic Consent Based Social Security Number Verification (eCBSV) program after lawmakers flagged concerns with cost overruns and price increases.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear whether eCBSV factors into a forthcoming SSA plan to make real-time Social Security number verification available to federal benefits programs. ...

When SSA launched eCBSV in 2020, SSA said it would charge new users a $3,693 administrative fee and returning users a $1,691 renewal fee. SSA also charged transaction fees, ranging from $400 for a user to submit up to 1,000 transactions, to $276,500 for users submitting between 200,000 and 50 million transactions.

Beginning in 2022, SSA eliminated the transaction fees, but began creating more tiers and increasing the transaction rates for high-volume users.

And as part of the most recent fee structure published in May, SSA raised the rates again for higher volume users. Those submitting between 15 million and 20 million cases will be subject to a $6.25 million annual fee; between 20 million and 25 million transactions will cost $7.25 million; and between 25 million and 75 million transactions will cost $8.25 million.

The new fee structure goes into effect in July.

The upshot, [Katie] Wechsler [of a group composed of banks, credit card companies and other large users of eCBSV] pointed out during last month’s hearing, is that a user submitting 20 million cases this year will pay 22 times what they were charged in 2021 for the same number of transactions. ...

An Extra $1.4 Billion, Please

     From Money:

Government agencies aren’t exactly known for their stellar customer service. People looking for help from the Social Security Administration (SSA), however, may have it particularly bad.

Average call wait times with the agency have more than doubled in a year, according to SSA data. Even worse, AARP, a leading critic of the SSA's customer service, says that the average amount of time for a Social Security disability claim to be processed has increased to 223 days — and that 10,000 people die every year while waiting for approval. ...

The SSA received a $785 million increase in administrative funding this fiscal year to revamp operations. Now AARP is campaigning for the agency to get another increase of $1.4 billion to address its woeful customer service. ...

Telephone Service Disruptions In 2021 And 2022

    From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Click to view full size

OIG Report On Pandemic Effect On DDS Processing Of Disability Claims

     From a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the effects of the pandemic on processing of Social Security disability claims:

While SSA received fewer initial claims during the pandemic, it took the DDSs [Disability Determination Services] longer to process them than the year before. Before the pandemic, DDS’ average processing time for an initial claim was 95.5 days. This increased to 139.4 days and 135.5 days, respectively, during the first and second years of the pandemic. Numerous factors contributed to this:

• CEs - The number of CEs [Consultative Examinations] performed during the pandemic decreased, as SSA suspended in-person CEs for a period of time. Once DDSs resumed in-person CEs, they still had issues scheduling CEs because for example, (1) not all CE providers returned to conducting CEs and (2) claimants refused to attend in-person CEs because of fear of exposure to COVID-19.
• DDS Staffing and Training – About 4,000 DDS employees resigned or retired during the pandemic, but DDSs hired 4,305 employees during this same time. However, it takes a newly hired disability examiner an average of 2 years to become proficient at processing most initial claim workloads.
• Telework and Communication with Claimants – During the pandemic, most DDS employees teleworked, so the DDSs needed to adjust to how they processed certain workloads. SSA provided the DDSs with basic cellular telephones to communicate with claimants, but claimants were wary of answering the calls as the telephones’ caller identification did not show the incoming call was from a state agency.
• Policies and Procedures – During the pandemic, SSA updated policies and procedures on how the DDS should operate. The updates included combined instructions with the field office, which confused some DDS employees about what pertained specifically to DDS processes.

Social Security's Telephone Service Is Terrible

    From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

SSA's telephone systems experienced an increasing number of service disruptions at the end of 2022 as it maintained operations under the temporary Unification platform. From May 2021 through December 2022, 40 telephone service disruptions occurred on the national 800-number and field office systems. The majority of these disruptions occurred from October through December 2022 and involved the 800-number. These disruptions resulted in dropped calls, increased wait times and, in some instances, unavailable automated services. Wait times increased as SSA employees could not take calls during several of the outages. Further, such functionalities as the “estimated wait time” and the “call back assist” features, which callers used to avoid waiting on the telephone to speak with an SSA employee, were no longer available to callers. The rate of unanswered calls for those who opted to speak with an employee during each of the service disruptions ranged from 32 to as high as 80 percent. ...

    I'll pull out some eye-catching charts from this report in coming days.

Direct Express Problems

     The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report on the Direct Express Debit Card program. Claimants who don't have a financial account into which benefits can be deposited can receive their money through a Comerica Bank debit card. The Comerica deal, which is with the Department of the Treasury, not Social Security, has been criticized because of high fees to benefits recipients and because people complained that they were assigned a debit card without asking for one. The OIG report found that there were some Social recipients complaining about receiving a debit card without asking for one. The OIG report also found that there has been a fair amount of money returned to Social Security by Comerica because of unfinished enrollments and that Social Security has been slow in making sure the claimants involved received their money. OIG found 39 cases where a claimant had been owed over $100,000.

Proposed Regs On Rental Subsidy Execption

     This is the description given for proposed new regulations that the Social Security Administration has sent to the Office of Management and Budget for approval:

We propose expanding the rental subsidy exception beyond the 7 states to which it already applies so that it applies nationwide. Accordingly, our nationwide policy would be that a business arrangement exists when the amount of monthly rent required to be paid equals or exceeds the presumed maximum value or the current market value, whichever is less. We expect that the proposed change would improve service delivery by making our policy uniform throughout the country and reducing administrative burdens for individuals seeking access to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program.

    I'm not familiar with this. Could someone explain it? Why is it only in seven states now? How has it worked in those seven states? 

    The only thing available to the public now is this brief description.

    At the rate that proposed regulations have been advancing, it will be two years or more before this could become a final rule and that's assuming there's no change in the party controlling the White House after next year's election

A Good Start

    From a press release:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), today introduced legislation to remove a Social Security work disincentive for Americans with disabilities. ...

If an adult has a severe medical condition that began before age 22, they may be eligible for a Social Security benefit called the Disabled Adult Child (DAC) benefit. Their benefits are based on their parent’s Social Security earnings, in the same way that benefits of a child under age 18 would be. However, under current law some of these young adults fear that if they try to work they will lose future DAC benefits, which are often higher than any benefit they may qualify on their own. This fear inhibits the ability of Americans with disabilities to explore their ability to work as they transition to adult life.

The Work Without Worry Act promotes financial security by ensuring that any earnings from work – no matter how much – will not prevent an individual from receiving a Social Security DAC benefit from their parent’s work history if they have an eligible medical condition that began before age 22. ...

This change is estimated to improve the lives of nearly 6,000 individuals with disabilities over the next 10 years and would have no significant effect on the Social Security Trust Funds. ...

     Now, how about we do something about the marriage penalty that cuts off DAC if a recipient marries.

SSI Is A Mess

     Gabrielle Emmanuel has put out a long piece for WBUR on the problems that SSI claimants, particularly children and their parents, face in filing claims, dealing with the Social Security Administration and staying on benefits. 

    SSI is disappearing before our eyes. Social Security lacks the money it needs to administer the program. There's all the money in the world to cut people off benefits but precious little to help people get on the SSI benefits they deserve and to help them stay on those benefits.

Union Complaints About Training

     From Government Executive:

... Rich Couture, president of AFGE Council 215 and the union’s chief negotiator with Social Security management, said a poor “self-taught” training model employed by the agency is leaving new hires unprepared for their duties and already looking for work elsewhere. Council 215 represents Office of Hearing Operations staffers.

“We have folks leaving the agency, because the training stinks,” Couture said. “I’d use another word, but we’re in polite company, but the training is terrible. The mentoring, based on an agency focus group report we just got last week, it looked like it was written by us, saying all the same things [we’ve been saying]. There’s not enough time; there’s not enough accommodation to make sure that it actually works. So instead, our folks are telling us, and they’re telling management when they leave, ‘I feel unsupported, I feel unprepared and I feel set up to fail.’ ” ...

A Sad But Familiar Story

    A television station in Denver presents the now all too familiar story of a disabled person becoming homeless because of delays in processing their Social Security disability claim. Here's a quote from the claimant's attorney:

"We had to re-fax the same paperwork six times over a period of about six months," the attorney explained. "But it's not just the faxing. It's calling, 'Did you receive the fax? No, we haven't received the fax,' Even my staff, when they call into the field office, they will wait on hold for sometimes an hour — if the call is even answered at all."

    This isn't just happening in isolated cases. It happens all the time. How is this acceptable?

Turning 18 Doesn't Make You Healthier

     Mark Betancourt writes for Mother Jones about the problems caused by kicking large numbers of disabled people off SSI when they turn 18. Here's the key quote:

... Youth who lost benefits at 18 were twice as likely to be charged with a crime as they were to hold a job. Compared with those who stayed on SSI, they were 60 percent more likely to be incarcerated. Most were charged with income-generating crimes like theft, fraud, or prostitution. And they didn’t just commit crimes at a higher rate immediately after losing their checks but did so over the ensuing two decades. The study also found that increased spending on policing, adjudication, and incarceration nearly erased any government savings from reduced payouts; the added expenses far outstripped the savings when victims’ costs were included. ...