Customer Service Delivery Plan

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report recommending that Social Security adopt a long term service delivery plan and by long term they mean ten years.

     I have heard this sort of recommendation before. I think it is nonsense. First of all, how do you make a long term plan when you have no idea what sort of appropriation you will have for the next fiscal year much less ten years from now? Second, even if you could predict your appropriation, how do you predict future information technology availability and public usage of that technology.? 

     The report is based upon a firm conviction that the public's usage of the internet will continue to soar indefinitely and that Social Security must plan for this. That is preposterous. At some point in the near future, internet usage is going to bump into hard barriers. A certain proportion of the population is illiterate or barely literate. There will always be limits on how much that group will use the internet. There are only so many hours in the day that the rest of us will spend on the internet. Internet use does not keep soaring forever. 

     I can tell you and any experienced field office employee at Social Security can tell you that Social Security is just too complicated and people are just too complicated to make the assumption that the agency's workload can ever be transferred to computers.

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New Claim After Unfavorable ALJ Decision -- What's Going On?

     Because of Social Security Ruling 11-1p many claimants will now elect to file only a new claim after an unfavorable decision from an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ). My clients who are attempting to do so are encountering a brick wall of resistance from local Social Security field offices. They are being told that they may not file a claim until 60 days have elapsed after an ALJ decision. This potentially costs my clients in this situation two months of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits as well as unnecessary delay. Social Security has not released to the public any instructions that would tell its staff to do what I am seeing. It is unclear to me whether I am seeing only a local phenomenon or whether there are instructions that have not yet been released to the public.

     Are attorneys in other parts of the country seeing the same problem in having a claimant file a new claim after an unfavorable ALJ decision? Are there staff instructions that have not been released to the public?

AFGE Report On Contract Negotiations

A recent posting by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) on the state of its contract negotiations with the Social Security Administration:

In recent months, the agency urged AFGE to agree to use small teams of management and union negotiators to address a variety of unresolved issues, so that we could narrow our differences and make progress in contract bargain-ng. Initially we had success, reaching agreement on almost everything in Article 33 (Temporary, Probationary, Part-Time Permanent and Seasonal Employees) through this small team approach.

However, progress came to a screeching halt in July when management walked away from a joint effort to reach agreement on a set of AFGE-proposed appendices to the Official Travel Article (Article 8).

SAA Usage At Social Security

Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report on the use of Senior Attorney Adjudicators (SAAs). The report is quite favorable for SAAs.

Happy 76th Birthday, Social Security!

By the way, note that the man in the light colored suit to FDR's left appears to have a cigar in his left hand. How times have changed!

Another Kentucky Law Firm In The News

From WYMT:

     An eastern Kentucky law firm has agreed to pay a more than seven thousand dollar penalty to the Social Security Administration.

     Kirk Law Firm was investigated by the SSA Office of Inspector General after signs were put up at offices in Prestonsburg and Inez that read, “Social Security Sign Up Office.”

     The OIG says the signs were confusing and misleading.

John Kirk says there was no attempt to mislead anyone with the signs.

Compassion Rewarded

From the Washington Post:

Diane Braunstein’s large smile and warm laugh can be infectious. She speaks calmly as she sits in a high-backed, dark wooden chair in her spacious Baltimore office, a master bureaucrat.

If that seems a cold or callous characterization, her actions have been anything but. One look at her résumé shows she’s spent a lifetime mastering the minutia of process and regulation on behalf of the elderly, the ill and the disabled at the Social Security Administration and other organizations.

Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue appointed Braunstein director of a program called Compassionate Allow­ances in 2007 after she helped him about 20 years earlier when his terminally ill father could not quickly obtain benefits.

The two were working together at the Department of Health and Human Services. Astrue’s father developed glioblastoma, an often-fatal brain cancer that resulted in a coma. Astrue found himself trying to file for benefits on behalf of someone who wasn’t able to speak.

“It was a huge surprise and a time of high anxiety,” he said. “Having someone as competent as Diane was a great blessing.”