What's Going On? Oh, Not Much

     It's been a few days since I've posted anything. You wouldn't expect much Social Security news over the Labor Day weekend anyway but there's usually a little bit.

    I will speculate that there are two causes for the slowness. First, it's the election season. My observation over the years is that Social Security is always careful to avoid making even the slightest news during a Presidential election season. I've always wondered whether this is explicit or just instinctive at Social Security. Second, I think Martin O'Malley has picked all the low hanging fruit he could find. Maybe he's planning to leave the agency after the election one way or another or maybe there's nothing more of consequence he can do without Congressional approval and there's no way to get that now.

Labor Day Weekend Poll

 

online polls

Social Security Administration Viewed More Favorably Than VA

From Pew Research Center. Click on image to view full size.

Limited Ability To File SSI Claims Online To Begin In December

    From a press release:

Today, the Social Security Administration announced a large step in a multi-year effort to simplify processes for people who are applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) by starting to offer an online, streamlined application for some applicants starting in December. SSI provides monthly payments to people with disabilities and older adults who have little or no income and resources.

The initial step – known as iClaim expansion – aims to establish a fully online, simplified iClaim application that leverages user-tested, plain-language questions, prepopulated answers where possible, seamless step-by-step transitions, and more. The online application aims to reduce the time spent applying as well as the processing time for initial claim decisions. ...

The rollout of the iClaim expansion will generally be available to first-time applicants between 18 and almost 65 who never married and are concurrently applying for Social Security benefits and SSI. A goal of the second phase – currently targeted for late 2025 – is to expand this to all applicants. ...

    This rollout is quite limited -- concurrent claims for people who have never married. Why is it limited in those ways other than to hold down the number of claims filed in this manner?  It's like they want to say they're doing it even though they're only barely doing it.

Interview With The Commissioner

     Commissioner Martin O'Malley gave an interview to the Dallas Morning News. Nothing earth shattering but it's still interesting that he's talking about Social Security's long term funding problem and the President's budget in a much more open way than prior Commissioners. You can tell that he's working for the President rather than trying to be scrupulously above even the hint of politics. The whole "Independent Agency" claptrap is fading away. It never worked. A government agency that pays money to one American in five is inherently part of the political system.

    Next step, make Social Security a cabinet level department.

New Regs On Setting the Manner of Appearance of Parties and Witnesses at Hearings

     The Social Security Administration has posted final rules on Setting the Manner of Appearance of Parties and Witnesses at Hearings. These formalize the procedures already in place allowing claimants the option of either an in person, video or telephone hearing. 

    The pandemic changed the Social Security Administration in many ways. This may be the most enduring change.

SSI Underpayments

A Tweet From The Commissioner

Had a blast visiting our @SocialSecurity offices in Arlington, TX, Albuquerque, NM, and Phoenix, AZ, this week! Getting great feedback from employees + customers 

 

Thank God For Survivor Benefits

     From CNBC:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night.

In his speech, Walz credited a particular source of support for helping to get his family to where they are today — Social Security survivor benefits.

His father died of lung cancer when Walz was 19, leaving a “mountain of medical debt,” Walz said. Social Security benefits allowed his family, including his mother and younger brother, to “live with dignity,” he recently posted on social media.

“Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits,” Walz said during his Wednesday night speech. ...

Hearing Office Wait Time

    From the Commissioner:

Click to view full size

    By the way, what happened to Alaska?

Singapore?

The Singapore Skyline

     I recently looked at the analytics on this board which give me a lot of information about visitors to this board, such as their operating system and which search engine they used if they used a search engine. Don't worry. Even if I were interested, I couldn't identify individual visitors. It's far from that detailed. 

    The analytics included a list of the hits on this blog from various countries. Here's what it shows as the top countries for a one week time period:

• United States 11.2K
• Singapore 6.56K
• Hong Kong 103
• Germany 56
• Australia 28
• Canada 19
• United Kingdom 19
• Russia 15
• Spain 7

    Apart from the U.S., you'd expect random hits from most of these countries. Hong Kong seems a bit high but who knows? However, Singapore really stands out. It only has a population of about six million. How many of the residents of that small, but wealthy, city state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula could possibly be interested in U.S. Social Security matters?

    My guess is that traffic from other countries -- probably the U.S. -- is being routed through Singapore for some arcane reason, perhaps through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) located in Singapore. I didn't know there were that many VPN users inside the U.S. There are other uses but VPNs are what you use when you're in China or Russia and you're trying to avoid government censorship. 

    Who knows? Maybe Google Analytics is hallucinating and those aren't real hits. Anybody have a guess?

New Regs On Representation Of Claimants

     The new regulations on representation of claimants and payments to the entities that represent claimants will appear in the Federal Register tomorrow. They will be effective in 30 days. You can read them today. 

    Here's a key comment and response from the explanation of the new regulations:

Comment: Commenters asked how we will ensure that entities are paid for work performed by their salaried employees when that work was performed as a part of the representative’s employment. Commenters had concerns that the proposed rule allows a representative to rescind an assignment prior to the award of a claim, thus creating the possibility that the representative could “take with them the fees to which the firm was clearly entitled.”

Response: While we recognize entities’ concerns about receiving compensation for work done by their employees, representative and entity relationships can take many forms, and we are not in a position to know how those relationships are arranged. We respect the choices entities and representatives make with regard to their employment agreements and contractual terms, and we established a process that is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of relationships. Permitting an individual representative to rescind an assignment is important to that flexibility, as rescission might be appropriate in certain relationships. For example, an employment contract might permit a representative to leave a firm’s employ but continue their representation and collect associated fees. ...

A Little Help Please

     I received this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I can't quite interpret it but it certainly seems to be relevant to Social Security. The downloads don't seem to have any data but that data must be somewhere. I'll confess that spreadsheets often mystify me. Maybe that's the problem.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

The ORS program released 2023 estimates on August 15, 2024, that complement those published February 8, 2024. These estimates include: Additional strength and specific vocational preparation (SVP) estimates in the ORS complete dataset and database tools. Special release dataset combining SVP 1&2 with minimum education and work hours published in XLSX format. Special release dataset aggregating previously published job requirements in XLSX format.

COLA Prediction

     One expert is predicting a 2.6% Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) in Social Security benefits this year. We'll know in a couple of months.

Video From The White House Social Security Anniversary Event

There Was A Celebration Of Social Security's 89th Birthday At The White House

 Click on each image to view full size.

Action Plan 2024

     Social Security has recently released its Action Plan 2024. It's a good summary of what has been done during the time that the current Commissioner has been on the job.

    Social Security can be proud of what has been accomplished this year but there's going to be no fundamental change for agency employees or those who deal with the agency until the agency gets a significantly higher appropriation. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There's no way to manage the agency out of the hole it's in. As former Commissioner Michael Astrue said, it's going to take "brute force," as in a lot more employees.

On This Day In 1935 FDR Signed The Legislation Creating Social Security In The United States

 

    Notice the only woman in the picture. That's Frances Perkins, who may deserve more credit for the bill's passage than anyone.

Report On Priority Cases

    From The Social Security Administration’s Processing of Priority Cases, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

... Each year, SSA identifies at least 200,000 (10 percent) of the initial disability applications as priority cases. SSA identifies priority cases for expedited processing through a combination of automated and manual means. Policy requires that SSA develop and process cases identified as priority expeditiously.

We reviewed 668,352 claimants whose initial disability applications SSA selected for priority processing. We also reviewed 153,964 claimants who had initial disability applications that may have been eligible for priority processing.

Generally, SSA properly identified, expedited, and processed initial disability applications that qualified as a priority case. SSA’s selection of cases for priority processing was proper for over 96.1 percent of claimants we reviewed.

However, SSA did not expeditiously develop and process initial disability applications for 11 (6.1 percent) of 180 sampled claimants. Delays occurred because SSA did not always monitor the processing of the 11 cases that were selected for priority processing to ensure they were processed expeditiously. Further, SSA’s policy does not specify overall processing timeframes and/or goals for priority cases. As a result, we estimate SSA delayed case development and processing for 40,844 claimants with priority cases.

OHO Caseload Analysis Report

     A statistical report from Social Security on performance at its Office of Hearings Operations:

Click on image to view full size