Commissioner's Broadcast E-Mail

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast 

Sent: Friday, October 07, 2011 3:43 PM

Subject: COMMISSIONER'S BROADCAST -- 10/07/11

A Message To All SSA And DDS Employees

Subject:  FY 2012 Budget

It’s hard to believe that this month is the start of my sixth fiscal year as Commissioner.

The news should be fairly familiar based on the patterns of recent years.  We are already on our second continuing resolution, which will expire November 18.  It is unlikely that our funding situation will be clear by that date; in the past five years we did not know what our budget would be until sometime between mid-December and mid-April.

This continuing resolution reduces our budget again in real dollars, and we have almost no margin for error even with a hold on hiring and IT initiatives and shifting other costs to the second half of the year.   If we continued with “business as usual” and, for instance, sent out the Earnings Statement as in past years, the postage alone require two full furlough days for every employee. 

The reason for hope is that both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are calling for increases in our budget.  They are also implicitly recognizing your success in reducing our hearings backlog and are making our top priority a significant increase in program integrity work.  If the full Congress approves funding at approximately the levels recommended in the Committees, then we would be able to do close to replacement hiring in the Disability Determination Services and limited hiring in Operations and Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR). 

We continue to try to find ways to improve service by finding efficiencies in our processes.  We expect to launch an improved iAppeals in December and hope to reduce the field office work in this area before long.  We are launching two new Spanish on-line services in the coming weeks, along with new Public Service Announcements with Don Francisco, which I believe will be instrumental in getting us to our four-year goal of moving from 10% to 50% in on-line retirement filings.  Since we gain both operational flexibility and save about 15 minutes with each online application, it is critical to our field offices that we continue our impressive progress in this area. 

Our telephone service is better than it has ever been, and I am hoping that the investments in technology and people we have made in recent years will give us the momentum we need for continued improvement.  Wait times are down for the teleservice centers, and we are effectively eliminating busy signals altogether.  Even in the field offices, we have reduced the busy rate to about 10 percent in the last few months.

By creating a new tool, the Office of Quality Performance helped Operations and ODAR clear out the entire backlog of non-DIB appeal cases.  Progress continues on the hearings backlog.  We have dropped from a high average processing time of 532 days in 2008 to 346 days last month.  No hearing office was higher than 494 days.  We still have a long way to go to hit our goal of 270 days, but with one last round of new judges and support staff, I am hopeful we will reach that goal on time.

By the way, on Monday night our spokesicon Patty Duke will be guest starring as a woman fighting Alzheimer’s on the new Hawaii Five-O.

Please savor your time with friends and family over the long weekend.  

                                                            Michael J. Astrue

                                                            Commissioner

ALJ Meeting In San Antonio

     The San Antonio Express-News reports that the Association of Administrative Law Judges (AALJ), a union that represents Social Security ALJs is holding a conference in San Antonio this week. The AALJ president Randall Frye told the reporter about AALJ's concerns with security and backlogs. AALJ still wants a government representative at Social Security hearings.

     Coincidentally, the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) is also holding a conference in San Antonio November 2-5.

Was This Supposed To Happen?

Social Security public affairs specialist Kristen Alberino recently spoke at a "pre-retirement" luncheon sponsored by Centinel Financial Group, apparently in Massachusetts. Centinel is a financial services company. I cannot say for absolute certain but it looks like the company was trying to sell its products at this luncheon.

I'll Eat Crow

     I have continued to study the House and Senate versions of the appropriations bill that is supposed to cover Social Security for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, which began on October 1. I now realize that, as some readers had tried to explain to me, the House Bill is actually better for Social Security than the Senate bill. It gives Social Security a bit more money. I'll not bore you with the details of my confusion. I've said many time that appropriations bills confuse me. If you've ever tried to read one you know why but you may not understand why I was stubborn about it. I don't understand that either.

     A more important point is that both bills would hurt service to people filing claims with Social Security. The Senate bill gives the agency about $11 billion plus $896 million which must be spent only on continuing disability reviews and SSI redeterminations (which I will call program integrity). The House bill gives the agency about $11.25 billion plus $896 million for program integrity. The comparable figure for FY 2011, which just ended, was $11.4 billion which could be used however the agency chose. Certainly, some of the FY 2011 appropriation was spent on program integrity but far, far less than $896 million. For everything other than program integrity, Social Security had $11.4 billion to spend in FY 2011 but would have only $11 billion to $11.2 billion in FY 2012 if one of these two bills is adopted. Social Security could and would use creative accounting to stuff as much overhead as possible into the program integrity category but however you cut it, the operating funds for taking and adjudicating new claims will be tight, especially when you consider that new claims continue to increase at Social Security and that the agency is already committed to expensive technology purchases and to the building of an expensive new national computing center.
     The likelihood that there will be a huge increase in program integrity work while the processing of new claims suffers would bother me less if I thought that Social Security could spend that $896 million efficiently. The program integrity work certainly needs doing. I just think we're heading into a confused, wasteful crash program. Let's use a crude method of evaluating this. Social Security has estimated that for every $25 million less than the fiscal year 2011 budget they get that they will have to furlough all their employees for a day. By this measure, the $896 million for program integrity amounts to about 36 work days for Social Security's entire staff. Since there are only about 250 workdays in an entire year, we are talking about devoting something like 14% of Social Security's workdays to program integrity. That would be up from, I'll guess here, something less than 5%. That is a huge change.
     The first part of this program integrity work is SSI redeterminations, making sure that SSI recipients are still poor enough to qualify for benefits. SSI income and resources rules are highly technical. If you don't think the rules are that technical, look back at this week's Quiz. It presented a simple straightforward SSI resources question, one that comes up fairly frequently. Only 12% of those taking the quiz got it right. Social Security only has so many SSI specialists. There is only so much overtime they can work. Some employees who are currently doing something other than SSI are going to get pulled off their current duties, hurriedly trained and put to work doing SSI redeterminations. Otherwise, Social Security won't be able to spend the money and those employees are going to get furloughed. These newbies are going to make mistakes. The poor claimants who get shortchanged will not have anyone representing them because there are few attorneys in private practice who know enough about SSI to represent them and because there is little way for the attorneys who do to make any money representing these people. The employees converted to doing SSI redeterminations will be unavailable to do what they had been doing previously, which has mostly been handling new claims. Those are going to pile up.
     Things are a bit better with the other part, continuing disability reviews (CDRs). This work is mostly done at the state Disability Determination Services. Their disability examiners should already be trained to handle the CDRs; at least I hope they are. Unfortunately, there is one major bottleneck. Once someone is cut off, they can appeal. The first level appeal requires a hearing not by an ALJ but by a DDS hearing officer. There are precious few of these hearing officers, nowhere near enough to handle the flood of terminations that may be headed their way. This is going to be a serious bottleneck. There will be no quick solution. These cases could get dumped on ALJs but that makes the backlog of cases awaiting hearing before ALJs worse.

Victim And Alleged Assailant Identified In Yesterday's Woodlawn Assault

The victim of yesterday's assault near Social Security headquarters in Woodlawn, MD has been identified as Obie Blackmon, a Social Security employee. He is recovering at Sinai Hospital. Gary Stokes, 25, has been charged with several crimes, including attempted murder, for the assault.

Quiz Answer

Question: Ms F. is drawing SSI benefits. During a redetermination she reveals that her mother died earlier in the year. As a result Ms. F and her sister inherited the mother's home, which has a fair market value of $250,000. Ms F. is not living in the house but her sister is. The sister has nowhere else to live. The fair market rental on the house is $1500 per month. Ms F. is:

Possible Answers:

• Ineligible for SSI because her interest in the house is worth more than $2,000
• Ineligible for SSI because of imputed rental income from her sister
• Eligible for SSI because her her joint interest in the house is not considered marketable
• Eligible because her sister is living in the house

Answer: Eligible because the sister is living in the house.

Post Reports On SSA Budget Issues

From Joe Davidson writing in the Washington Post:

After a recent briefing by SSA officials on the potential impact of budget reduction scenarios, the union representing 30,000 Social Security employees in 1,200 field offices sent a letter to Democratic senators “to express our deep-seated concerns about the impact of potential reductions in spending on the program and its beneficiaries.” ...

According to the union letter, which was reviewed by the SSA at the Federal Diary’s request, even with current funding, the agency has had to freeze hiring in most of its sections; expects to lose about 2,500 federal employees, plus 1,000 state employees who are paid with federal funds; did not open eight new hearing offices; and has suspended mailing Social Security statements.

If the 2012 budget remains at 2011 levels, it would be an effective $800 million cut, in part because of increasing costs, according to the letter. The SSA workforce would drop by an additional 4,400 federal and state employees, for a total of 7,900 workers in two years. Almost 400,000 fewer disability claims would be processed, taking the backlog to 1.2 million and the processing time to longer than four months.

That also “would greatly delay other less visible workloads, as S.S.A faces a snowball effect of staffing losses two years in a row,” the union letter said.

I had posted about this letter on September 24.

More On Shooting Near SSA Headquarters

From the Baltimore Sun:

An employee taking a lunchtime stroll during a break from his job at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn was robbed and shot on a secluded wooded path on Monday, prompting officials to put the federal campus on lockdown.


The shooting occurred about 11:45 a.m. off Social Security property. Police said the victim walked or stumbled back toward the sprawling complex and collapsed on an access road near Woodlawn Drive and Parallel Road, near the entrance to the Social Security West building and a series of parking lots.


Detectives had not made any arrests as of Monday evening. The victim, whose name and age were not disclosed, was taken by ambulance to Sinai Hospital in Northwest Baltimore. Police said his injuries were not considered life threatening. ... 

Shortly after 3 p.m, Baltimore County police were called back to the Social Security Administration complex for a report of a suspicious package. Police said the package contained a pair of eyeglasses, and police were gone by 4 p.m. 

Police said occupants of one building were briefly evacuated.