Shifting Focus

From Frontline, the newsletter of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA):

Although Commissioner Astrue was not able to attend the [early October NCSSMA] conference, he did engage in active conversation with the delegates through a video conference. ... He also shared his vision of the future for field offices, describing the future as an “evolution rather than a revolution”. He expects field office positions will gradually evolve from handling repetitive, high volume workloads to handling the most complex cases while automated services begin handling more of the simple cases. ...

He predicted that ODAR [Office of Disability Adjudication and Review] will likely stop being the focus of the agency’s budget by the end of FY 2011 at which time field offices and customer service needs will likely become the primary focus of the budget.

And It's Not Even Popular!

A Washington Post poll shows that 57% of Americans oppose reducing the FICA tax by two percent. Even most Republicans oppose it. It is the only part of the package opposed by most people.

I think people understand the risk and they don't like it.

Expect A House Social Security Subcommittee Hearing On This Next Year

From the Boston Globe:

Her toddler was adorable and rambunctious, but his vocabulary was limited to “Mommy’’ and “that,’’ while other children his age knew dozens of words. When little Alfonso tried a full sentence it came out in a swirl of sounds, often followed by a major league tantrum when he realized he was not understood. And so his mother, Roxanne Roman, was not surprised when the 18-month-old was diagnosed by a specialist with speech delay.

It came as a shock, however, when she learned from relatives that Alfonso’s problem might qualify him for thousands of dollars in yearly disability payments through the federal Supplemental Security Income program. ...

Within three months, the boy’s application was approved. Alfonso receives $700 in monthly cash benefits, plus free government-paid medical coverage. Roman said her relatives told her she can pretty much count on the disability checks for Alfonso, now 5, to keep arriving in the mailbox for the rest of his childhood.

“They don’t ask many questions about the child once you’re approved,’’ Roman said. ...

Driving much of that growth is the twelvefold spike since 1997 of children approved based on a primary diagnosis of delayed speech, a sometimes persistent but more often short-lived affliction that starts in toddlerhood. ...

Government data show that Social Security officials have, over the past decade, fallen far short when it comes to conducting the regular case reviews required by statute. A typical SSI disability case is supposed to get a full medical review every three years, but from 2000 to 2008 the agency examined, on average, only 10 percent of the children on SSI. ...

Many early childhood specialists were stunned to learn that speech delay had become such a popular gateway for children’s SSI benefits and suggested that that may be because it is the easiest-to-measure impairment among preschoolers. ...

At a Social Security Administration waiting room in Lawrence one day this summer, the mother of a 9-year-old girl said her daughter was approved quickly for SSI payments as a toddler with speech delay and has never had a full review of her disability status. ...

When asked if she thinks her daughter is still severely disabled with her speech, Tina replied hesitantly, “No.’’ ...

“I know she’s not severely disabled anymore,’’ the mother said. “It’s an interesting thing, really, that she does still qualify. She gets better and better.’’ ...

Officials said they recognize that the lack of disability reviews is a major problem, one they tie to a shortage of staff and funds....

he Western Massachusetts city of Holyoke, one of the poorest in the state, provides an extraordinary window into how the SSI disability program works for some of the youngest children, for better and for worse.

Here, 1 of every 5 children living in poverty receives SSI disability benefits. And of the 939 children who qualified last year, 699, or 74 percent, were approved for behavioral, learning, or developmental delays, data show — the highest percentage among all ZIP codes in Massachusetts. One of three of those on SSI was approved after a diagnosis of speech delay, according to federal data obtained by the Globe through a public records request. ...

Expect the House Social Security Subcommittee to hold a hearing on this next year. Expect pressure on Social Security to approve fewer of these kids and to review more of their cases once they go on benefits. Expect Social Security to cut back on service in other ways in order to free up the money for these reviews and for the appeals from denials.

An Easy Solution

From Emergency Message EM-10086:

Discontinuation of the Mid-Atlantic Program Service Center (MATPSC) Remittance Accounting Unit (RAU) Hotline ...

MATPSC is discontinuing the RAU hotline due to extremely high call volume. Effective immediately, all FOs [Field Offices] and PSCs [Program Service Centers] are to contact MATPSC via e-mail ...

If a debtor contacts your office about canceling recurring credit card payments, please take the following actions:

· Send an e-mail to ||PHI ARC PCO RDDB DMS the same day the debtor contacts your office.

It sounds like the situation is that the activities of this unit generate a lot of calls from the public and from other Social Security employees who have been prompted to call by members of the public. There are just too many calls to deal with. They find a simple solution. They change to what amounts to an unlisted telephone number and send out a message telling Social Security employees to stop calling them. Social Security employees can send e-mail messages. The public can no longer communicate directly with them. This shifts the unit's problem to other components of Social Security. Probably, this means that this unit never hears of some problems. This unit does get to sort out the problems to the extent they have the manpower to address them and does not have to listen to members of the public complaining about the delays.

What Are AARP's Values?

From a 2005 Businessweek article:

In Washington, an entity's power can be measured by the vehemence of the attacks it draws. By that standard, AARP may be outmuscled only by the White House in the slugfest over restructuring Social Security. ...

AARP's role in the Social Security debate has focused new attention on the hundreds of millions of dollars the group makes by endorsing and co-branding health insurance, financial products, and travel services that are sold to its members. ...

Just as important is the question of whether a group that makes millions selling financial services to its members is quite as impartial a player in the debate over private accounts as it would appear. ...

[I]t is equally clear that AARP makes a substantial sum of money from its partners' sales of mutual funds and other investment products to members. That raises the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. Whatever version of reform passes -- whether Bush's accounts carved out from payroll taxes, or the "add-on" accounts that many liberals favor to encourage retirement savings -- the overhaul is likely to create new markets and opportunities ...

AARP officials reject the criticisms. The organization's marketing "does not in any way influence AARP's public policy positions," says Dawn M. Sweeney, president of AARP Services Inc., the for-profit subsidiary that manages AARP's co-branding deals. ...

Still, the scale of AARP's commercial activities is enormous. The nonprofit is one of the nation's most aggressive in selling its name to marketers of financial and travel products. In 2003, the latest year for which financial reports are available, AARP collected $300 million -- or 39% of its $770 million in revenue -- by co-branding ...

If critics have focused on its policy role, AARP has received less scrutiny for the quality of its products. Many of the funds and insurance policies that AARP markets provide considerably less benefit than seniors could get on their own, a BusinessWeek analysis reveals. ...

Ought To Be Held Sacrosanct

From the Associated Press:

Social Security taxes "ought to be held sacrosanct," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security.

"When you start to signal that the (Social Security) tax levels are negotiable, you end up in long-term trouble, I think, in terms of making absolutely certain that the entitlement funding streams are secure," Pomeroy said. ...

"This 2 percent payroll tax cut is the beginning of the end of Social Security as we know it," said the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which is led by former Rep. Barbara B. Kennelly, D-Conn. "Worker contributions have successfully funded the program for 75 years and that critical linkage between contributions and benefits is what keeps Social Security a self-funded program."

Et Tu, Brute?

From Sam Stein writing at Huffington Post:

The country's foremost senior-issues advocacy organization on Friday night lent its support to a critical provision of the president's tax cut deal with Republicans.

In what could prove to be a consequential assessment of "the framework," AARP's Executive Vice President John Rother says that both he and his organization have determined that a two percentage point reduction in the payroll tax rate (from which Social Security gets its revenue) would not endanger the solvency of their community's cherished program.

"Benefits Denied" Isn't Enough

From Spiva v. Astrue (7th Cir. December 6, 2010)

The government implies that if the administrative law judge’s opinion consisted of two words—“benefits denied”—a persuasive brief could substitute for the missing opinion. That is incorrect. It would displace the responsibility that Congress has delegated to the Social Security Administration—the responsibility not merely to gesture thumbs up or thumbs down but to articulate reasoned grounds of decision based on legislative policy and administrative regulation—into the Justice Department, which represents the agency in the courts.

Update: Just to clarify: The Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) decision did not consist merely of two words. The Court of Appeals found the ALJ's rationale sorely lacking and held that Social Security could not defend the decision by telling the Court what rationale the ALJ could have used. The Court held that the ALJ decision must be judged upon what it said, not upon what it might have said.