New Forum For Social Security Disability Claimants

Allsup, which represents Social Security disability claimants mostly on behalf of long term disability insurers but which is also seeking individual cases, has just started a web forum for Social Security disability claimants.

Improper Payments Info To Become More Visible

From Government Executive:

Federal agencies soon will be required to create dashboards on their Web sites tracking the amount of money they have spent on improper payments, under a new directive from President Obama.

The executive order -- which Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag previewed last week -- is aimed at increasing the transparency and public scrutiny of payments to beneficiaries of federal programs, contractors, grant recipients and other entities.

Chairman Of Social Security Subcommittee To Retire

Representative John Tanner, the Chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, has decided not to seek re-election in 2010. Tanner is one of the founders of the Blue Dog coalition.

Swamped

From Federal Times:

The Social Security Administration has been working for years to reduce its backlog of disability claims, which now stands at 780,000 claims. It even hired and trained 8,600 new employees last fiscal year.

But any progress it made has come to an abrupt halt. Largely because of the recession, Americans filed 400,000 more disability claims than predicted last year and the agency expects 700,000 more to be filed this year than in 2008.

SSA is not alone. Agencies across government that provide federal assistance are seeing their workloads explode as Americans seek unemployment insurance payments, health care insurance, school lunches, food stamps and college loans. Benefit claims and payouts have jumped in the last year at assistance programs run by the Labor, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services departments, among others.

One Down

From EM-09078 issued by Social Security last Friday:

Republic Bank and Trust (RBT) has notified SSA that it is discontinuing its Currency Connection Direct Deposit program. The program solicited SSA beneficiaries to have their payments deposited into an RBT master account, then distributed to various sub-accounts (check cashing services or other businesses). SSA has approximately 50,000 Title II and Title XVI beneficiaries that need to make alternative payment arrangements based on this change.

Now, if we could get rid of Allsup's ability to "Withdraw overpayment funds directly from claimant’s bank account using our patented electronic process."

New Office In NC

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

The Social Security Administration will employ about 200 people at a new site in Research Triangle Park [North Carolina] that will act as the agency's headquarters in the Durham area.

Highwoods Properties announced last week that the SSA had leased 68,000 square feet of office space in its Pamlico office building. ...

A spokesperson for the SSA said the agency has been hiring people for the headquarters since 2008 and will continue to fill positions locally and through relocations. The RTP office will provide IT and administrative services for the SSA.

This is in my backyard. This sounds awfully large for an area supervisor office, but maybe I don't know just how big those are. Can anyone enlighten me as to what this is for?

Department Of Justice?

From American Medical News:

After what it called a successful year testing the National Health Information Network with select hospital systems and regional health information exchanges, the Social Security Administration said its next step will be to exchange data with the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and the Dept. of Justice. ...

The exchange would be an extension to earlier testing the SSA did with MedVirginia, a regional health information organization serving Virginia, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Jim Borland, special adviser for health information technology for the SSA, said in June that since the exchange with MedVirginia started in February, the organization reduced the average time it takes to process disability applications from 83 to 32 days. In some cases, applications were received and processed the same day.

NADE Newsletter Out

The Fall 2009 issue of the newsletter of the National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE) is out. NADE is an organization of personnel who work at the state agencies which make disability determinations at the initial and reconsideration levels for Social Security. This issue of their newsletter includes articles on presentations made at recent NADE events by Commissioner Michael Astrue, former Commissioner Dorcas Hardy, and Assistant Deputy Commissioner for Communications Phil Gambino.

I was surprised to see almost nothing in this newsletter about furloughs affecting NADE members. I would have expected that to be a major issue for NADE.