Social Security has released
updated stats on payments of fees to attorneys and others who represent Social Security claimants. See below. They shows a stunning decline in payments made since the beginning of the fiscal year, October 1.
I am well aware that the Social Security Administration does not exist to provide me and other attorneys with a means of making a living. However, when you are looking at these fee payments you are looking at a near perfect analogue of payments to disability claimants. The attorneys get paid at the same time as the claimants. If payments are delayed to the attorneys, it is only because payments are delayed to the claimants. Can I make it any clearer? This is not just an attorney problem. It is a sign of a major problem brewing.
Not only are October and November the lowest months for this calendar year; they are the two lowest months since December 2009! October and November are down 15% from the average for the preceding. fiscal year. Continue this over the entire fiscal year and it will be taking 1.8 months longer to get a claimant paid after a favorable decision or almost three months total.
There is some reason to believe that things are not as bad as they seem. The October payments were affected by Social Security's
bizarre decision to tell many of its employees that it would essentially ignore any work they did in the last month of September. There were fewer favorable decisions issued in late September to be implemented in October. That was a bureaucratic foul up that will not be repeated.
Unfortunately, there are other reasons to be pessimistic about coming months. There is virtually no overtime at Social Security now and there is virtually no hiring. With no hiring, Social Security's workforce is slowly shrinking, which means that the payment delays will slowly accelerate as the workforce slowly declines. But, it gets worse still. Social Security has an annual workload crunch in January of each year. This is caused by the number of people who retire at the end of each calendar year, as well as the mailing of forms asking retirees under full retirement age to predict their earnings for the coming year and the mailing of SSA-1099s. These two mailings come at the very end of December or in January. They generate a spike in calls to Social Security's 800 number in January of each year. Social Security has traditionally responded to the increased telephone calls in January by "spiking" the employees whose normal job is putting claimants on benefits, that is calling them off their regular duties to answer the phone (something they do poorly but that's another story). In the past, Social Security has tried to make up for the "spiking" with overtime. With no overtime, there's going to be two problems in January. The phones won't get answered and claimants who have been approved won't get put on benefits. Unless Social Security has a little money for overtime, not only will the payment numbers for January be brutal; the telephone situation is going to be awful as well.
This is all a predictable consequence of Republican budget cutting. An indefinite continuation of this results in the Social Security Administration falling apart. Giving Social Security a slightly higher budget but directing that a huge proportion of the total budget get spent on program integrity, which seems to be the plan favored in Congress at the moment, does not help. It may make things worse.
Fee Payments |
|---|
| Month/Year | Volume | Amount |
Jan-11 | 34,467 | $113,459,847.04 |
Feb-11 | 33,305 | $107,796,771.38 |
Mar-11 | 34,885 | $112,463,768.46 |
Apr-11 | 48,033 | $153,893,755.37 |
May-11 | 36,479 | $115,159012.77 |
June-11 | 33,568 | $104,782,743.07 |
July-11 | 40,451 | $123,981,011.36 |
Aug-11 | 35,575 | $109,778,785.74 |
Sept-11 | 36,159 | $109,990,042.36 |
Oct-11 | 27,269 | $79,526,149.33 |
Nov-11 | 32,677 | $100,272,851.46 |
