Social Security Advisory Board
Meeting Agenda
Friday, August 24, 2007
1:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Discussion with Technical Panel and the Trustees Working Group
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.
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.
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.
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.
