Service Slipping

From today's New York Times:

Unsure from week to week how much money Congress will provide them as the two parties battle over the budget for the rest of this year, federal officials say many agencies have been operating in chaos, confusion and uncertainty. ...

Michael J. Astrue, the commissioner of Social Security, said the agency had cut back distribution of annual earnings and benefit statements and had suspended plans to open eight hearing offices that would tackle a huge backlog of appeals by people seeking disability benefits.

Like most of the government, the Social Security Administration has been financed for more than five months with short-term spending bills known as continuing resolutions. Congress is expected to pass another three-week spending bill this week that will continue to pare back financing from last year’s level.

“Because of the uncertainty of our budget,” Mr. Astrue said, “I have had to make choices that will begin to erode service.”

House Appropriations Hearing

The House Appropriations Committee has scheduled a hearing for March 17 on improper payments. Social Security is not the only focus of the hearing but Social Security's Inspector General, Patrick O'Carroll, and Deputy Commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, will be testifying. Note that there has not yet been a hearing on Social Security's appropriation. Of course, O'Carroll and Colvin will undoubtedly use this as an occasion to tell the Committee that additional employees at Social Security would save money.

No Overtime At Payment Center

An e-mail I recently received:

Hello. I work for the Social Security Administration, Payment Center 7, in Baltimore, MD, as a Claims Authorizer (CA).

We handle the SSA disability case workload. One function of my job is to trigger ALJ [Administrative Law Judge] disability awards to payment, providing the non-medical requirements are met. We also do post adjudicative work, such as imposing and removing workers' compensation offset.

CA's have had overtime offered to us for years, both during the week and on the weekend. We need the overtime hours to keep up with our workloads.

Today, Friday the 11th, all the Modules in the Security West Building (PC7) had emergency meetings to announce that all overtime is cancelled indefinitely for all positions. This is apparently related to the budget situation and the continuing resolution.

Hopefully they will find a way to resolve this and restore overtime soon, at least on weekends. I fear that claimants will suffer if this situation is not resolved shortly.

The disability caseload keeps growing, and the cases and disabled claimants are not going to magically disappear, and it seems that some in Congress don't understand this. It is somewhat discouraging to think that someone who has waited for years to have an ALJ hear their case will now have to wait longer to have their award processed, even after the favorable ALJ decision is made.

$200 Million Gone

It appears that Democrats have agreed to rescind $200 million that had previously been appropriated for investment in Social Security's information technology infrastructure. Information Week Government reports on just how urgent this investment is.

It is unclear where this leaves Social Security's appropriations otherwise.

Update: It appears that the $200 million recission is part of a deal for a three week continuing resolution.

Fee Payments Stats

Updated numbers from Social Security on payments of fees to attorneys and certain others for representing Social Security claimants.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-10	32,227	$111,440,046.23
Feb-10	29,914	$105,708,101.59
Mar-10	34,983	$122,874,426.87
Apr-10	44,740	$153,478,589.32
May-10	34,686	$119,527,194.40
June-10	32,432	$111,887,579.72
July-10	32,232	$132,328,622.27
Aug-10	34,755	$119,424,346.42
Sept-10	32,660	$108,650,373.60
Oct-10	38,705	$128,133,064.77
Nov-10	31,788	$106,559,848.38
Dec-10	33,315	$108,879,872.67

Jan-11	34,467	$113,459,847.04
Feb-11	33,305	$107,796,771.38

Why Appropriations Matter

Information Week Government has a strong reminder of why the appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives would be terrible for Social Security. Social Security's primary data center is obsolete. There is a serious risk for catastrophic failure. The House appropriations bill would take away the money already appropriated to replace the data center.

Study Finds Excellent Public Experience With iClaims

Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently did a study of claimant experience with Social Security's online application process for retirement benefits. Here is an excerpt (footnote omitted):

To obtain applicants’ perceptions of the iClaim application and determine whether applicants filing for RIB [Retirement Insurance Benefits] using the iClaim application were receiving an appropriate level of service from SSA, we discussed their experiences with 200 applicants who filed an RIB iClaim application in May 2010.5 Based on our discussions, we determined that applicants had a positive perception of the RIB iClaim application process. In fact, 198 of the 200 applicants identified their experience filing online to be excellent, very good, or good, with almost half providing the top rating of excellent (see Chart 1).

There is one big caveat to this. The report is only talking about retirement claims which are, by far, the simplest claims that Social Security takes. A study of the far more complex online disability claims would show that Social Security still has a long way to go.

Bad Signs

From the Associated Press:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Friday that GOP senators will not vote to increase the government's borrowing limit unless President Barack Obama agrees to rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the debt ceiling is reached.

Meanwhile, a senior Treasury official" warns that a government shutdown may be unavoidable