Costs Of E-Verify

From Federal Computer Week:

The House has begun to debate the effectiveness of the Homeland Security Department’s electronic employment eligibility verification system, E-Verify. Some lawmakers are considering making it mandatory for all employers while others are pushing for an alternate system ... A report from the Government Accountability Office released today estimates that a mandatory E-Verify program would cost about $765 million from fiscal 2009 through 2012 to verify only new employees and $838 million to verify new and existing employees in the same period. In addition, SSA has estimated that a mandatory program would cost $281 million for fiscal 2009 to 2013 and require an additional 2,325 employees.

Results Of Last Week's Unscientific Poll

One person wondered why they saw an ad for one Presidential candidate when they registered their vote in this poll. The reason is that I am cheap. The online provider that I used for the polling services provides it either for free or for a charge. Since I am cheap, I use the free service. But we know there is no free lunch. The "price" of the free service is advertising. Usually, the ad has nothing to do with the poll and is mostly ignored. One of the presidential candidates happened to be advertising on this polling service at the time the questioner voted in the poll, which may have seemed a bit startling, but I had nothing to do with the placement of the ad. Interestingly, when I went to retrieve the poll results this morning, the ad that came up was for the other Presidential candidate!

If the election were held today, who would get your vote for President of the United States?

Robert Barr, Libertarian Party (10)	7%
John McCain, Republican Party (37)	27%
Ralph Nader, Independent (2)	1%
Barack Obama, Democratic Party (89)	64%

Total Votes: 138

I Wish There Were More Of These

From the Texarkana Gazette:

The Social Security Administration will present a seminar on work and disability Thursday at the Texarkana Public Library.

The seminar will be from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the library at 600 West Third Street, Texarkana, Texas.

Anyone with questions can contact Lisa McBay, SSA claims representative at 903-792-3818 ext. 231 or by e-mail at lisamcbay@ssa.gov.

It seems to me that policymakers in Washington and Baltimore cannot grasp that work incentives for disabled people do no good unless the public understands how they work. This sort of public outreach effort is desperately needed since the work incentives we have are so complex, but staffing is so short at Social Security offices that there is little of it.

2007 Technical Panel Report

This is definitely the "wonk zone."

The Social Security Advisory Board has finally released a report that it received last year from a technical panel it assembled to review the Social Security Administration's actuarial projections.

The report's "executive summary" needs an executive summary of its own, but as anyone familiar with Social Security's highly regarded actuarial operations would expect, there is no real criticism in the report.

Stats By Congressional District

The Social Security Administration has released a set of statistics by Congressional District.

Social Security On The Campaign Trail

From the Associated Press:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama on Friday called for higher payroll taxes on wage-earners making more than $250,000 annually, a step that would affect the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans.

The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income."

The 6.2 percent payroll tax is now applied to all wages up to $102,000 a year, which covers the entire amount for most Americans. Under Obama's plan, the tax would not apply to wages between that amount and $250,000. But all annual salaries above the quarter-million-dollar amount would be taxed under his plan, Obama said.

Obama also said his rival, John McCain, has indicated in the past he was willing to consider higher payroll taxes.

But Douglas Holz-Eakin, the Republican candidate's senior economic policy adviser, said that as president, McCain would not consider an increase "under any imagineable circumstance." ...

McCain, campaigning Friday in New Jersey, said Obama was misrepresenting his position.

"I will not privatize Social Security," he said. "But I would like for younger workers, younger workers only, to have an opportunity to take a few of their tax dollars, a few of theirs, and maybe put it into an account with their name on it. That's their money."

He told reporters later on his campaign bus: "Private savings accounts have to be voluntary, they have to be only for young people, and they can't be the centerpiece of the argument. We have to solve this problem and not worry about private savings accounts, because even though I support them, I don't think it's central to the issue. Central to the issue is that the system is going broke. Of course I'm not for privatization. But I do think young workers ought to have some options."

Current retirees would not lose any benefits, McCain said.

Fee Payment Stats

The Social Security Administration has released updated figures on payments of fees to attorneys and others for representing Social Security claimants. As I always say upon posting these numbers, the attorney is paid at about the same time as the claimant. When you see that payments of these fees go up or go down, you are seeing payment of benefits to claimants go up or down.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-08	20,559	$75,368,163.45
Feb-08	26,570	$95,228,284.32
Mar-08	23,088	$83,166,027.02
Apr-08	27,296	$98,616,579.78
May-08	29,305	$104,283,373.35

Where You Are

I thought I would share some info from Google Analytics about the locations from which people are logging onto this blog. These figures below are from the past week for the United States. There are a negligible number of hits from outside the United States. The figure given is on the number of visits, rather than the number of page views.

Apparently, 77% of the visitors coming from the ssa.gov domain show Maryland as the location from which they are logging on and 23% show North Carolina. None show any other location, but obviously, people in other states are logging onto this blog from ssa.gov. My impression is that Social Security must have two major internet portals, one in Maryland and one in North Carolina, through which all ssa.gov access to the internet is routed, regardless of where the person accessing the blog may be sitting. The location of this portal is reported rather than the actual location of the user.

And, by the way, I have no way in the world of determining exactly who is reading this blog. Google Analytics gives a lot of information, but it cannot identify any individual.

1.	Maryland	1,491
2.	North Carolina	537
3.	California	131
4.	District of Columbia	127
5.	Missouri	117
6.	(not set)	115
7.	Virginia	114
8.	Illinois	104
9.	Georgia	101
10.	Massachusetts	98
11.	New York	85
12.	Michigan	82
13.	Ohio	80
14.	Florida	77
15.	Texas	75
16.	Pennsylvania	64
17.	Tennessee	55
18.	Washington	54
19.	New Jersey	45
20.	South Carolina	43
21.	Kansas	27
22.	Iowa	24
23.	Oregon	24
24.	Delaware	24
25.	West Virginia	23
26.	Connecticut	22
27.	Alabama	20
28.	Colorado	16
29.	Maine	15
30.	Utah	14
31.	Oklahoma	13
32.	Nevada	13
33.	Wisconsin	12
34.	Minnesota	11
35.	Arkansas	10
36.	Indiana	10
37.	New Mexico	9
38.	Louisiana	8
39.	Kentucky	8
40.	Arizona	7
41.	Vermont	7
42.	New Hampshire	7
43.	Mississippi	7
44.	Rhode Island	5
45.	North Dakota	2
46.	Nebraska	2
47.	Hawaii	1