SSAB Issues Report: Allowance Rates

     The Social Security Advisory Board has issued a 130 page document titled  Aspects of Disability: Decision Making: Data and Materials. It is filled with charts which one can use to make many different points. I'll post several but let's start out with this one. You can make a lot of different points based just upon this chart alone but one you cannot easily make is that it has become less difficult to get on Social Security disability benefits in recent years. Hearing allowance rates went up slightly but only because allowance rates went down at lower levels. Recently, all allowance rates have gone down a bit.

     The difference at the hearing level between dispositions and decisions is the cases dismissed for technical reasons such as filing the request for hearing too late or failing to appear for a hearing.

Threats In Tennessee

     From WKRN:

Police arrested a man after he made threats against workers at the Murfreesboro [Tennessee] social security office on Monday. 

Suspect Brian Bottoms is accused of telling an employee "He might just have to do something destructive" after he learned he could not get money he thought he was owed to pay child support....

In 1995, Bottoms and his brother were arrested after they threatened to kidnap the former publisher of The Tennessean John Seigenthaler and WLAC radio talk show host Les Jameson. 

Officers raided the brothers' home and located three pipe bombs. ...

Agents searched his car [yesterday] and found cleaning supplies, a cinder block and a guitar.

Alan Simpson Doesn't Listen And Doesn't Know When To Shut Up

     From Michael Hiltzik at the L.A. Times:

Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming), perhaps our leading avatar of misinformation about Social Security, sent us a lengthy email on Friday responding to our series of posts criticizing his error-rich take on the nation’s preeminent social insurance program.

You can read his entire email here. Be forewarned: It’s a dizzying compendium of ignorance, myths, irrelevancies, and historical revisionism, leavened with a healthy dollop of defensiveness.

      Hiltzik goes on to completely demolish Simpson's absurd arguments that Social Security was never intended as a retirement program and that the lower life expectancy at the time of adoption of the Social Security Act is some crucial fact.

Trying To Screen Rep Payees

     The Social Security Administration is starting a three to six month project to screen new representative payees, that is people who handle Social Security benefits for those who are unable to handle their own money. The project will try to screen out those with a history of criminal offenses in categories such as human trafficking, sex offenses, fraud, theft, abuse, forgery and homicide. This is in response to publicity given to a horrible case of representative payee abuse in Philadelphia last year.

     Lack of manpower caused by low appropriations may limit Social Security's ability to take this project national.

Early Processing Of Social Security Checks -- Signing 7,000 Per Hour

District Office Manager Retires

     From the Corsicana, Texas Daily Sun:

Polly Winn is retiring as the district manager of the Corsicana Social Security office Friday after 38 years with the administration.

When she graduated from Blooming Grove High School, Winn said her plans were to become a special education teacher. She was already fluent in American Sign Language because both her parents were deaf.

Instead, she ended up working for Social Security ...

Throughout [her career at Social Security], her skills with sign language have been helpful, since so few people in the administration know it. People from around Texas have come to Corsicana to meet with Winn and get help with their Social Security claims. She’s even had people come from as far away as Kansas. ...

Yes, We Really Do Need All Those Levels Of Review

     From Ludwig v. Astrue, an opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued today, quoting from a letter sent by a Social Security Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) to an attorney who was representing Mr. Ludwig:

Shortly after your client’s hearing . . . a special agent with the F.B.I.  informed me that, earlier, he had observed Mr. Ludwig in the parking lot walking with normal gait and station; and when he observed Mr. Ludwig walking inside of the Federal Courthouse (where our hearing was held) he was walking with an exaggerated limp (which I also observed as he left the hearing room).

Should you wish to inquire further, [the special agent] can be reached at the F.B.I. office at:
101 12th Ave
#329
Fairbanks, AK, 99701

     The attorney asked either that no weight be given to this ex parte statement or that a new hearing be held. The ALJ did not schedule a new hearing and issued a decision denying the claim, saying that he had not assigned "significant weight" to the ex parte statement of the FBI agent.

     The Court of Appeals remanded the case for a new hearing, saying that "The judge should have refused to hear the ex parte communication. Ordinarily, if someone says to a judge, 'Judge, you know that case you heard this morning?', a judge responds, 'Don’t tell me anything about it. I can’t listen to evidence out of court.'" I thought that was well understood even by non-lawyers.

     I've got three questions:

1. How did this case get to the Court of Appeals? The Appeals Council or the District Court should have remanded the case in a heartbeat.
2. Why was Social Security defending this at the District Court level much less at the Court of Appeals?
3. Does that FBI agent's supervisor know that he made an ex parte contact with an ALJ? I was under the impression that most FBI agents were attorneys. Don't they know better than to do something like this?

     People wonder about why we need so many levels of review of Social Security cases and then you see something like this.

     Update: I should have read to the end. The Court of Appeals affirmed this travesty as harmless error. I cannot believe it. This is wrong. There is no reason for anyone at Social Security to feel anything but shame over this win.

Interesting

     That Emergency Message announcing the end of the Work Incentives Planning and Assistance (WIPA) and Protection and Advocacy for Beneficiaries of Social Security (PABSS) programs that I posted about yesterday has now been taken down from Social Security's Emergency Message site. WIPA and PABSS are both directed at helping Social Security disability recipients navigate Social Security's incredibly complex work incentives.

     How did this happen? What does it mean?