Baucus On Stimulus Checks To Prisoners

From Dow Jones Newswires:

U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D- Mont., criticized the Social Security Administration for mistakenly sending $250 economic stimulus payments to each of 1,700 prison inmates.

According to media reports, SSA officials did not respond to inquiries from prison employees who processed the checks. Baucus, in a statement Tuesday, called the reports "troubling."

"SSA should issue a full report on this failure to respond to these requests in a timely manner. We made a concentrated effort to protect American taxpayers in crafting recovery legislation, and many correctional officials were doing their part to prevent an abuse of taxpayer funds," said Baucus.

Unwinding Part Of DSI

Before publishing a proposed regulation in the Federal Register any federal agency needs the permission of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is part of the White House. Social Security has just sent a proposal to OMB to partially unwind the Disability Service Improvement (DSI) plan that had been implemented in Social Security's Boston Region. DSI was the brainchild of former Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart. DSI has proven to be unworkable, but it has remained in effect in the Boston Region. The part of DSI that Social Security proposes to unwind relates to appeals of Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) decisions. The parts of DSI relating to hearings would remain in effect in the Boston Region.

I do not understand why Social Security is not completely unwinding DSI.

Cutting $2.2 Billion In Salaries Only Saves California $1.3 Billion

From the Los Angeles Times:

State worker Rochelle Johnson's $38,000 salary never allowed her family to live in luxury. Then the furloughs hit, cutting her pay by 14%.

Now Johnson, an appointment scheduler at a California agency that reviews disability applications, finds herself at the mercy of payday lenders, utility companies' patience -- they shut off her power once already -- and co-workers who share their lunch leftovers. ...

In some limited cases, the furloughs could be waived at little or no cost to the state.

The $2.2 billion in pay cuts is expected to save the state's general fund only $1.3 billion in this budget year. The other $900 million is paid from separate funds or with federal money. Most workers are paid through a combination of sources.

Rochelle Johnson's pay comes entirely from the federal government.

"Why are we furloughed if we are federally funded?" she asked. "I don't think I should have to put my child in danger because Arnold decided on what was best for me." ...

"We would be discriminating against other state employees if we said, based on your funding source, we're going to apply a different personnel policy to you," said Lynelle Jolley, a state Department of Personnel spokeswoman. ...

NPR Story On Delays

National Public Radio has a story today on delays in adjudicating Social Security disability claims.

Waiting On Congress

There are three major Social Security matters pending action by Congress.

The current federal fiscal year ends on September 30, 2009. The Labor-HHS Appropriations bill that will fund Social Security's administrative operations has been passed by the House of Representatives and has been reported out of committee in the Senate. It now goes to the Senate floor and then to a conference committee to work out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. Will it be passed before the end of this fiscal year? We'll see. If not, Congress will surely pass a continuing funding resolution that will keep Social Security going at the rate of the preceding fiscal year, but continuing funding resolutions make planning tough.

Withholding of fees for certain non-attorney representatives of Social Security claimants sunsets in February 2010 unless this is extended by Congress. I do not want to alarm anyone but there is no visible sign of movement on this.

Withholding of fees for representing claimants for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) also ends in February 2010 unless this is extended by Congress. Again, I do not want to alarm anyone but there is no visible sign of movement on this.

Quotas On Disability Claims Approval Alleged

From the Press-Register (a newpaper which is based somewhere in Alabama, but try finding which city using their online edition!):

Some former medical consultants at the Alabama agency deciding thousands of Social Security disability claims each year say they were pressured to approve more applications, an assertion backed by e-mails obtained by the Press-Register. ...

The Social Security Administration's inspector general, a kind of an internal watchdog, is now conducting a review of how claims are handled, a spokesman said last week. Citing that review, Tommy Warren, director of Alabama's Disability Determination Service, declined comment on the e-mails. He said that for comparison purposes, the agency lets employees know what the allowance rates are in other Southern states, but added that it does not have goals.

The e-mails, sent by supervisors at the Birmingham-based agency between 2006 and last year, urged consultants to shoot for a 30 percent "allowance rate." ...

Among eight Southern states, the agency had the highest allowance rate (44.3 percent) statewide for applications for disability insurance. It ranked 5th for SSI claims at 29.5 percent allowance and, at 23.2 percent, was third in approving "concurrent claims" for both disability insurance and SSI.

That showing came some two years after a supervisor voiced concern about how Alabama stacked up in the region.

"If you have consistently had allowance rates below 30 percent, you need to look at your decisions very closely," she told dozens of consultants in a January 2006 e-mail. Similar exhortations followed in 2007 and last year.

"If your allowance rate is below 30 percent, refer back to your plans of action and continue to work on bringing your allowance rates up," another supervisor wrote in a May 2008 e-mail. ..

At a meeting last year, consultants were told "that our (office) had one of the lowest allowance rates in the country," said Samuel Popkin, a clinical psychologist hired to evaluate claims of mental impairment. "The tone and implication . . . was that that was not a good thing."

"I certainly felt the pressure, let's put it that way," said Gordon Rankart, also a psychologist.

Rankart, who worked for the Birmingham disability office for some 6½ years, said he was repeatedly "hammered" over his allowance rate. Both his and Popkin's contracts were not renewed. Popkin said he was not told the reason. Rankart said he was informed that his work had problems. "This has nothing to do with my work performance and I'm not going to pretend that it does," he said.

Again citing the inspector general's review, Warren declined to say whether allowance rates are a factor in renewing consultant contracts, but noted that the agreements can be ended by either side with 30 days' notice.

Begun in May and prompted in part by an anonymous complaint, the inspector general's review is aimed at ensuring that the Alabama agency's claims-handling process is fair and that applications are "being adjudicated the way they should be," said Wade Walters, the agency's assistant inspector general for external affairs in Baltimore.

The review is expected to be completed by year's end.

Let me throw out an explanation why Alabama should not have a low rate of allowance of disability claims. On the whole, Alabama's workforce is poorly educated, has weak job skills and has lousy access to medical care. This combination leads to a high rate of disability claims and should lead to a high rate of approval of those claims since the definition of disability that Social Security must use makes education and work experience relevant in determining disability and poor access to medical care leads inevitably to poor public health. Poor education, weak work skills and poor access to medical care are the case across most of the South.

The South is where I practice, so I have some knowledge of this. Indeed, I see this in a particularly vivid way since my office is in Raleigh, which has a well-educated population with high work skills and good access to medical care, but many of my clients live in poor communities 50 to 100 miles away. Compare the populations and the number of disability claims and disability benefits recipients in Robeson County and Wake County, NC sometime. The difference is stunning. It would be even more stunning to compare Cary, NC and Red Springs, NC. I can recall having a day of hearings in Robeson County some years age with a visiting Administrative Judge (ALJ) who had just came in from Boston. I had three clients in a row who were illiterate. The ALJ asked me pointedly if all my clients were illiterate. I told him that until the early 1960s Robeson County had had three separate school systems. The school system for whites was lousy, the school system for blacks was much worse and the school system for Lumbee Indians was much worse still. Most older Lumbees at that time were illiterate. (The passage of time since the integration of school systems has made this situation better, thank goodness.) I had happened to have had three hearings in a row with older Lumbees. In context, there was nothing remarkable about their illiteracy. The hearing assistant who was a local was nodding her head in strong agreement with what I was saying. The ALJ seemed stunned. (By the way, the story of the Lumbees is fascinating. They are one of the largest of native American tribes but remain unrecognized by the federal government largely because of the opposition of other Indian tribes and an extraordinary amount of simple discrimination which was aided and abetted for many years by Jesse Helms. Before I finish digressing, read about the 1958 battle -- and I do mean a battle -- between the Lumbees and the Ku Klux Klan, a truly great story.)

Poor education, weak job skills and lousy access to medical care are not spread evenly across the population. One very large group in Alabama, African Americans, is much more affected than others. I won't go any farther along this line since you can see where it leads.

The real story here is that Social Security may have quotas or goals for approval of disability claims. You can criticize this because you think the quotas or goals are too high or you can criticize this because you think the quotas or goals are too low or you can criticize the whole idea of quotas or goals. The way in which you criticize quotas or goals may suggest something about your political or social views.

Astrue: Agency "Moving Backwards"

From the Des Moines Register:

Todd Lindberg has lived for a year and a half in a storage garage in northwest Des Moines. He sleeps on a well-worn couch in a dark corner of the building, amid construction equipment, tools and snowmobiles.

With most of one foot amputated and part of the other missing, he qualifies for federal disability benefits that would pay for an apartment and groceries.

But getting those benefits is not easy.

A massive backlog of unresolved disability claims at the Social Security Administration has kept Lindberg and millions of others waiting years for benefits they earned while in the work force. The delays have led to splintered families, foreclosed homes and suicides.

Last year, a 49-year-old Missouri truck driver died in the lobby of a Social Security office while waiting to be called into the office for a hearing on his three-year-old claim for benefits. During the past year, the number of people waiting to have their claims processed has increased more than 30 percent, from 556,000 to more than 736,000. The head of the Social Security Administration, Michael Astrue, has acknowledged that the situation might soon get worse. The agency is "moving backwards" in its efforts to keep pace with a recession-driven influx of new claims, he said. ...

Social Security's West Des Moines hearing office handles most of the cases from Iowa. Individual judges there have tried to catch up on their workload by hearing 70 to 80 cases each month, as opposed to their usual 50 to 60 cases.

"That's too many cases," said Denzel Busick, the office's chief administrative law judge. "We can do that for a while," he said, "but you wouldn't want us doing that on a sustained basis because, as a judge, you start to think, 'What am I forgetting here? What am I overlooking?' ...

There is almost universal agreement about the cause of the disability backlog: Funding and staffing levels at the Social Security Administration have gradually dropped to their lowest levels since 1972, while the number of Americans applying for disability benefits has increased. Early this year, the number of unresolved cases was declining, but the economic crisis is making things worse: As the job market tightens, people with limited abilities have fewer job opportunities.

But in a sidebar, we get the traditional Republican response that Social Security must reorganize its way out of the backlogs:

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley said he is not sure additional spending by the Social Security Administration would help reduce the backlog. He said the agency needs to change its structure, in part by fast-tracking initial decisions on claims, improving the productivity of judges and transitioning to electronic record keeping."More money can't solve all of the problems," Grassley said. "You can never satisfy these bureaucracies if you always accept the excuse that they need more money."

Where Are The Grownups?

From the Wisconsin State Journal:

State officials are considering furloughing some 200 workers who determine Social Security benefits for the disabled at the same time they are forcing those employees to work costlier overtime hours.

To help close a gaping budget hole, the state is furloughing almost all of its employees, including the workers who help decide who can claim federal disability payments, even though furloughing those workers won’t actually save money because they’re paid by the federal government. ...