Ethical?

     Harry Gross, the Personal Finance Columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, received a question from a reader who asks if it is ethical for his wife to take an early retirement buyout from her employer after being approved for Social Security disability benefits. Gross' response:

That's a tough one. You have an ethical as well as a financial dilemma. There are several choices. You could repay S.S. for the money she received and withdraw the disability request. She would then request the benefit in a new application after she took the buyout. She could keep the S.S. money and accept the buyout. This carries the financial risk of being discovered by either S.S. or her employer, and is an ethical lapse. She could forget the buyout with no repercussions. It is obvious to me that she cannot ethically accept both amounts. The buyout seems to be very substantial, so that leaves us with returning the S.S. money, taking the buyout, and reapplying for the disability at some later date. Good luck!

     No, Mr. Gross, this isn't a tough one. You should have called someone at Social Security before answering this question. Taking the buyout as well as Social Security disability benefits is perfectly legal. Some things that are perfectly legal are unethical but this doesn't seem like one to me. I don't think it's even close.

Sad Story From Orlando

     From the Orlando Sentinel:

Harley Christopher Andrews died of a brain tumor Sept. 2. He was only 23, dying before he had a chance to really begin living.

Twelve days later, his mother, Wendy Andrews Smith, opened this cheerful note from the Social Security Administration addressed to her firstborn: "

We're writing to let you know that we have made a disability hearing decision on your case. Our decision: We find that your condition has improved and you are capable of working."

      The article goes on to say that the brain tumor was a glioblastoma multiforme. I have too much personal experience with glioblastoma multiforme. My mother and my sister both died as a result of this type of brain tumor. It is invariably fatal. (No, it's not a familial tumor but there is a modest statistical increase in the risk of the tumor if you have a family member who has been diagnosed with glioblastoma. There are no published reports of three members of the same family having suffered a glioblastoma multiforme. Yes, I think about it.) I have over thirty years of experience with the Social Security disability programs. I cannot imagine how Mr. Andrews' benefits were cut off. This is as bad as a mistake can get at Social Security.

Weird Online Accusations

     There is an online "op ed" making allegations about impropriety at Social Security. There is little factual information in this piece.

     The piece includes a breathless report that Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue will not be re-appointed once his term runs out in January 2013 because of misconduct at Social Security. There is nothing in the piece that even hints at anything that Astrue has done wrong. In any case, Astrue has said he does not want to be re-appointed and there's every reason to take him at his word since six years in that job should be enough for anyone, especially in this budget climate. It's rather unlikely that Mitt Romney would have considered the question of whom to nominate to be Social Security Commissioner if he is elected. He's too busy trying to get elected. I hope President Obama's staff, at least, has been working on this question. It's rather unlikely that Obama would try to persuade Astrue to stay on since the AFL-CIO, which represents most Social Security employees, is no fan of Michael Astrue, to say the least and Obama has every reason to listen to the AFL-CIO since it is working hard to get him re-elected.

     The "op ed" includes the statement that:

New evidence has reportedly surfaced that another Administrative Law Judge, William Gitlow, has been allowing attorney [Eric] Conn and his staff to write their clients actual appeal decisions and forward them to Gitlow. A practice that is both unheard of and forbidden by the Office of Disability Adjudication and Reviews 169 offices across the US.

     Unheard of? Forbidden? In 2008, Social Security was encouraging attorneys to write decisions for Administrative Law Judges. I am unaware of any directive forbidding this practice. Other sorts of trial courts routinely require attorneys to draft decisions.

Disabled People Who Return To Work Usually Don't Last Long

     From a study by the Center for Studying Disability Policy (footnotes omitted):

Each year, SSA publishes information about work activity among beneficiaries. Those statistics tend to show relatively little beneficiary employment; indeed, only about one percent of beneficiaries each year have had their cash benefits suspended or terminated because of work. However, the statistics do not paint a complete picture of the number who forgo cash benefits for work because they exclude beneficiaries who have worked for a long time and are therefore no longer formally connected to SSA programs. To develop a better idea of how many beneficiaries work, SSA and Mathematica Policy Research developed an indicator for “nonpayment status following suspension or termination for work” (NSTW), based on a complex set of SSA administrative data. This indicator captures all months that beneficiaries have given up cash benefits specifically because of work ...

These statistics show that considerably more beneficiaries are forgoing cash benefits because of work than those reported in SSA’s annual reports. SSA’s published statistics show that fewer than one in 100 beneficiaries in each program have their benefits suspended for work in a typical month. However, our statistics reveal that, during a typical month in 2006, about 2.5 beneficiaries were off cash benefits (with benefits either suspended or terminated) because of work for every 100 receiving a benefit payment ... TTW [Ticket to Work] participants are more likely than other beneficiaries to enter NSTW. In 2006, 3.4 percent of TTW participants had their first NSTW month versus 0.7 percent of nonparticipant beneficiaries. The NSTW indicator also allowed us to assess the incidence of NSTW after Ticket assignment for several years; by the 48th month after assignment, nearly 17 percent of TTW participants had had at least one NSTW month, compared to just under 7 percent after 12 months.

      First, even with the increased return to work numbers this study shows, there still are few disability benefits recipients returning to work. Second, while you can read the chart above as showing that Ticket to Work helps, you can also read it as evidence of selection by Ticket to Work providers or self-selection by beneficiaries. What the chart does show unambiguously is that the vast majority of those on Social Security disability benefits who attempt to return to work don't last long. This study does not confirm the common belief that there are many Social Security disability recipients who have the capacity to return to work if only they're given the right encouragement and help. Even when they really want to and even when they receive a lot of help, few of them succeed in returning to work for the long haul.
     This study is a few months old. There are reasons why you haven't seen Ticket to Work proponents touting it.

Budget Falls As Workload Increases

     From the U.S. News and World Report:

Citing budget pressures, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has once again suspended mailing paper statements and will begin next month to close its more than 1,200 field offices 30 minutes earlier each day. Next January, the offices will begin closing at noon each Wednesday. ...

"People are not going to get their calls answered properly, and they're going to show up at [Social Security] offices and find them closed," says Timothy Gearan, senior legislative representative at AARP. "That's going to cause a lot of trouble." ..

Citing Social Security statistics, Gearan says more than 180,000 people a day visit Social Security offices and nearly 450,000 a day call the agency for assistance. Both numbers are rising due to increasing claims spurred by the recession plus the surge of retiring baby boomers.

Gearan says the SSA has been victimized by continuing legislative gridlock between Congressional Republicans and Democrats. The department's funding for operational expenses is paid from discretionary appropriations, not from the independent Social Security trust funds. Current agency administrative spending is about $11.8 billion a year, Gearan says. "Social Security was spending just about that amount two years ago, and we know we've had a heck of a lot more people coming through" since then to use agency services. The agency's budget "is about a billion dollars below where we think it should be."

"They've lost 9,000 employees over the past three years," he says, "and we expect them to lose another 1,000 jobs this year ... They're doing wonderful work but they're just caught in a bind between the two parties in Congress."

     Social Security is not "caught in a bind between the two parties in Congress." One party wants to adequately fund Social Security. The other party is blocking adequate funding because it wants to cut Social Security's budget to the point that the agency is incapable of operating. Knock off the false equivalence. Be honest about what's happening.
     The head of the union that represents most Social Security employees has also written on the same subject for the Federal Times.

Award For OIG

     From the Covington Reporter:

The Social Security Office of Inspector General anti-fraud team, including the team in Western Washington, is being recognized with a Commissioner’s Citation, the Social Security Administration’s top honor, for its outstanding work investigating and prosecuting government benefit fraud cases.

In fiscal year 2012, the Western District of Washington led the nation in the number of convictions for benefit fraud and the total amount of restitution ordered.  The award is for results in 2011, when Western Washington also led the nation in convictions and was first in the amount of restitution ordered to reimburse the Social Security Administration for fraudulently-obtained benefits.

More Of The Work Incentives Nonsense

     Julie Turkewitz and Juliet Linderman have a piece in today's New York Times Opinion section calling for more work incentives in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability program. They believe that there are many SSI disability recipients who would like to go back to work but who are trapped because of a lack of work incentives in the SSI program. 

     Turkewitz and Linderman are wrong. We have an incredible assortment of work incentives in the larger non-needs based Disability Insurance Benefits (DIB) run by Social Security. These work incentives have not caused any significant number of DIB recipients to return to work. SSI disability recipients are, on the whole, far more hopeless candidates to return to work than DIB recipients since they are people who had little or no work history before going on SSI disability benefits to begin with. At least DIB recipients worked regularly in the years leading up to going on disability benefits. You're never going to return many SSI disability benefits recipients to return to work. They're too sick and too many of them have diminished cognitive abilities and chronic mental illness for this to be realistic.

     I have serious questions about the person that Turkewitz and Linderman use as their poster child, Brad Crelia. Why is it that he never earned enough money to get DIB?  Apparently, he did work a fair amount in the past. Why doesn't he just get a regular job now and give up SSI? According to Turkewitz and Linderman that's what he wants to do. What's holding him back? Is it really a  lack of work incentives? He'd certainly have more income if he went to work.  Exactly what work incentive does he need to return to work anyway. The piece says at one point that Crelia dropped out of college because he was too sick to continue but at another point says that Social Security should have given him a loan so he could finish college. Which is it? If he was too sick to continue his education, a loan wasn't going to help. If a loan was all he needed, why did he need Social Security to give him the loan? It's possible to get educational loans whether you're disabled or not. Crelia's story doesn't make much sense.

     Members of Congress like to think that it would be possible to significantly reduce the money spent on disability benefits by providing additional work incentives. They keep enacting one work incentive after another thinking that just one more piece of legislation will do the trick and disabled people will flow back to work. The result is an extraordinarily complex system of work incentives that don't work. Social Security employees don't understand them so how can we expect disability benefits recipients to understand them? Even if they did understand them, the disability recipients wouldn't go back to work for a simple reason. It's so damned difficult to get on Social Security disability benefits that very few people who get on benefits have any realistic hope of ever returning to regular work. They're way too sick.

Security Upgrade Planned For Central Offices

     From the Baltimore Sun:

The Social Security Administration is planning to build a "security barrier" at its Woodlawn headquarters that officials say is needed to protect employees and visitors.

Though available details of its design are sparse — several elected officials said they had not yet been briefed on the plans — an agency spokesman acknowledged that millions of dollars have been budgeted for security upgrades at the agency's headquarters, including some form of barrier.