Cert. Petition In Public Citizen Case

The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA) contained items that modified Social Security law, particularly in regard to the payment of back SSI benefits. The DRA has been controversial because it was not passed by the two houses of Congress in exactly the same form. The most prominent litigation on this has been Public Citizen v. Clerk, U.S. District Court.

The DRA has been upheld by the District Court, 451 F.Supp. 2d 109 (D.D.C. 2006) and the Court of Appeals, 486 F.3d 1342 (D.C. 2007). Public Citizen has now filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court. Although this litigation has gotten short shrift so far, it is of basic constitutional importance and cert may well be granted.

Tamperproof Social Security Cards Proposed

This is the proposal that Michael Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security, says would require a doubling of his agency's staff, which means this Senator's costs estimates are off by an enormous factor. From the Associated Press:

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday he will introduce legislation to replace all paper Social Security cards with plastic biometric cards that can't be duplicated, so employers can be certain of the legal status of their workers. ...

Employers need a system they can rely on to determine the legal status of potential workers, so Graham said he plans to introduce a bill this fall to replace all Social Security cards over the next 10 years at a cost of $8 billion to $10 billion. The new cards would be tamperproof.

A Resurrection

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

SPOKANE -- Eight years after a judge declared him dead, the Social Security Administration says Judy Sullivan's husband is alive, and it wants back more than $90,000 in survivor's benefits she has received.

But Sullivan doesn't think the person who applied for a new Social Security card and a driver's license in an unspecified Eastern state is Jack Sullivan, her husband of 25 years who disappeared without a trace in 1991. ...

Social Security officials have not responded to her requests to prove the person is not an identity thief, Weiser said. ...

"I can tell you it's devastating because I don't know now. I just can't believe that my husband is alive," she said. "I just can't believe he would do something this way. It's not him. He's just not this kind of a person." ...

Meanwhile, the legal clinic [representing Mrs. Sullivan] has asked for a waiver of the benefits "overpayment" until the matter can be resolved. Allen Gilbert, an official of the agency's Spokane office, told The Spokesman-Review the chances of the waiver being approved are good because Sullivan applied for and received the benefit money in good faith.

A Social Security Spokesman Accidentally Demonstrates The Source Of The Problem

From WSBT in South Bend, IN:

It's a problem facing more than 20,000 families in Indiana and nearly 50,000 in Michigan. People, who say they're unable to work, are appealing to the Social Security Administration for disability benefits; but they have to wait for years. ...

The Selners [who are waiting and waiting for a Social Security disability hearing] are in a very long line. They're among 24,000 Indiana families still waiting to appeal their case to an administrative law judge. In fact, Indiana has one of the biggest backlogs in the country.

Advocacy groups for the disabled ranked Indiana as seventh worst when it comes to delays in getting an appeal hearing. Michigan is fourth.

"I don't think I would characterize it is a crisis, but it is something we are extremely, extremely concerned about,” said Robert Walsh, spokesperson for the Social Security Administration.

Would this look like a crisis to Robert Walsh if it was his family?

New No-Match Rules

The U.S. Custom and Immigration Enforcement issued rules yesterday that will require employers to fire workers whose names and Social Security numbers do not match. The Social Security Administration has been sending no-match letters to employers for years, but there was no punishment for ignoring the letters. Now, there will be punishment if employers ignore the no-match letters. Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney, has posted in his blog a useful list of frequently asked questions about these new rules. For those interested in the effects of these new rules upon the Social Security Administration, the key points are that these new rules are effective on September 9, 2007 and that there are serious penalties if employers ignore no-match letters.

These new regulations add a new and unpredictable workload to Social Security's field offices, as many who have failed to notify the Social Security Administration of name changes are forced to contact Social Security.

SSA Seeks To Improve LTD Insurers Debt Collection

Under the Paperwork Reduction Act all federal agencies must publish notices in the Federal Register when they plan new systems that require or allow members of the public to provide information to the agency in a systematic way. Here is a quote from a notice published in the Federal Register today seeking comments:

SSA is in the planning stage of developing the Agency's second phase of the fee-based web service system which would provide private industry and other third party requesters with disability and retirement data (including insured status information, dates of entitlement, and benefit amounts). [The first phase was simple Social Security number verification.] This process, the Consent Based Benefit Information System (CBBI), would assist private insurance or pension benefit companies to determine private entitlements and coordinate entitlement to such benefits. These actions help the requesters to reduce and/or eliminate the overpayment of these benefits to their insured clients. Similar to the CBSV process, companies would be required to enter into a legal agreement with SSA, obtain written consent from the record holder, reimburse SSA, and follow SSA's established systems security and audit guidelines.

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OASDI Beneficiaries By State And County

Social Security's Office of Policy has released OASDI [Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance] Beneficiaries by State and County, 2006, which lists the number of persons receiving various types of Social Security benefits in each county in the United States.