What Is This About?

From a list of audit reports prepared by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Defense Contract Audit Agency's Audit of Lockheed Martin Services, Inc. Incurred Costs for Calendar Year Ending December 31, 2004 (Limited Distribution)

No copy of this audit report is available to the public. The stated explanation of "Limited Distribution" is "These reports contain information that is sensitive and confidential. For security reasons, distribution of these reports is limited to those with a need to know."

What is this about? Why are the Defense Contract Audit Agency and Social Security's OIG looking at the same thing? Why is Social Security's OIG concerned with a secret audit report at the Department of Defense? There may be some harmless explanation of this, but it has an Orwellian ring to it.

Poll -- Only For Those Who Represent Claimants

Free Web poll for your Web site - freepolls.com

Results Of Last Week's Unscientific Polls

Should Martin Gerry have been fired in the manner in which he was fired (lock on door changed, escorted out of building by security guard)?

Yes (68)	54%
No (32)	26%
Don't Know/No opinion (25)	20%

Total Votes: 125


How do you rate the overall quality of service that the Social Security Administration currently gives to the public?

Excellent (10)	16%
Good (10)	16%
Fair (21)	34%
Poor (21)	34%

Total Votes: 62

Large Scale Hiring At SSA

The USAJobs website now lists 76 open jobs at Social Security. To put it in perspective, Social Security would have to list several hundred just to make up for the job losses since the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1, 2006.

What Will Andrew Biggs Role Be?

Social Security has updated its website to show Andrew Biggs as Deputy Commissioner. Curiously, the organizational chart still shows him to be "Deputy Commissioner, Policy," which is a different job. Is it possible that Biggs will not be involved in the day to day operations of the Social Security Administration, as one might expect of THE Deputy Commissioner, that functionally he will continue to operate as the "Deputy Commissioner, Policy"?

There has been no sign that Biggs has ever had any interest in the day to day operations of the Social Security Administration. Why would you want to be responsible for keeping the trains running on time if your goal was to blow up the locomotives and tear up the tracks? The Policy office does research, which is closer to the kind of work Biggs has done in the past, although recently he has been more of a polemicist than a researcher.

An Image From 1997

NY Times On Biggs

From the New York Times editorial page:

...Andrew Biggs, the president’s choice to be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, is a champion of partially privatizing the program he is being sent to administer. The agency dispenses checks to beneficiaries and traditionally provides factual information on the state of the program. But under this president the agency has become increasingly politicized, using questionable arguments and projections to support Mr. Bush’s drive for private accounts. As a lower ranking official in the agency, Mr. Biggs was in the thick of that politicization. His appointment is a sure sign that Mr. Bush intends to keep using the agency as a propaganda machine to push a privatization scheme that has little public support.

Attorney Fee Payments Go Up Dramatically In March

Social Security has released the March 2007 figures on payments of fees to attorneys and others for representing Social Security claimants. They are shown below. Payments shot up in March, apparently because Social Security was able to authorize a large amount of overtime for its payment center employees.

Payments of attorney fees closely mirror payments to claimants. Slowdowns or speedups in these payments reflect slowdowns and speedups in payments to claimants who have been approved..

Where did the money come from for overtime? There had been no overtime at Social Security from October until late March. A good guess is that money that had been earmarked for implementation of former Commissioner Barnhart's Disability Service Improvement (DSI) plan was released for other, more pressing, purposes. There was a flurry of activity at Social Security in mid-March indicating that DSI was dead.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-07	15,331	$55,149,991.81
Feb-07	19,301	$69,731,683.72
Mar-07	26,505	$94,396,916.02