One Of The Reasons Social Security's Death Master File Is Made Public

     From the AP:

More than $1.1 billion in unclaimed life insurance benefits have been recovered nationwide after an investigation, New York regulators said Wednesday.

The state's Department of Financial Services said many insurance companies were not using lists of recent deaths from the Social Security Administration to determine whether a policy holder had died. That meant if family members did not know there was a life insurance policy or forgot to file a claim, the policy went unpaid.

New York regulators say they directed insurers to use the Social Security master file to investigate unclaimed policies -- just as insurers used the list of recently deceased to determine when to stop annuity payments.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said state investigators working with insurance companies were able to make payments to 100,000 consumers nationwide, including more than 25,000 New York residents. The oldest claim dated to a death in 1960.

Unemployment And Social Security Disability; Also, What Are The Chances Of Chained CPI Being Adopted If The Chairman Of The House Ways And Means Committee Is Afraid To Even Use The Term "Chained CPI"?

     From a press release issued by the Chairman of the House Social Security Subcommittee:

Yesterday, Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security Chairman Sam Johnson (R-TX) introduced H.R. 1502, “The Social Security Disability Insurance and Unemployment Benefits Double Dip Elimination Act of 2013.”  The legislation would keep people from receiving both Social Security disability benefits and unemployment benefits at the same time.  A similar proposal was included in the President’s FY2014 budget with estimated savings of $1 billion over 10 years.

     In addition, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare is reporting that the House Social Security Subcommittee has introduced legislation to switch Social Security to the Chained CPI method of computing the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). There is a press release from the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee obliquely suggesting that this is under consideration. The word "bipartisan" is used over and over in this press release but the term "Chained CPI" is never mentioned.

Work Incentives Fail Everywhere

     Great Britain decided that there were too many people drawing disability benefits under their social security system. Their plan to deal with this was to get one in six disability recipients back to work. Their definition of "back to work" was quite modest -- holding down a job for three months or more -- yet according to The Guardian newspaper all they have been able to achieve is about one in twenty returning to work. If you were to apply that British definition of a successful return to work to recipients of U.S. Social Security disability benefits, I think we'd already be returning 5% or more of disability benefits recipients to work.
     Returning large numbers of disability recipients to work isn't doable, no matter what you try. I keep harping on this point since members of Congress keep pursuing the return to work dream despite the overwhelming evidence that they're wasting their time.

Man Found Guilty In Shooting Outside SSA Headquarters

     From the Baltimore Sun:

A Baltimore County man was convicted Wednesday in the nonfatal shooting of an employee outside the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn in 2011.

Gary Stokes, 23, was found guilty by a Baltimore County jury in the shooting that caused the Social Security complex on Security Boulevard to go on lockdown for more than an hour.

Police said Stokes robbed Obie Blackmon of his cellphone and then shot him in the arm as he was taking an afternoon walk in woods near the campus.

Former Lawmaker Pleads Guilty To Social Security Fraud

     From CNS:

Raymond E. Salva, a former Democratic member of the Missouri House of Representatives, has pleaded guilty to illegally taking $58,816 in federal disability payments while he was working as a state legislator earning $30,000 a year, according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration. ...

In May 2003, about five months after he started working as a state representative, the SSA conducted a review to find out whether Salva was still eligible for disability payments. “As part of that review, Salva completed a form in which he affirmed that he was not able to return to work and that he had not done any work since being disabled,” reads a press release from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). ...

Sympathy For Binder And Binder?

     Take a look at Jillian Kay Melchior's snarl on National Review Online. She's mostly targeting Charlie Binder of Binder and Binder but she goes way beyond him. The whole piece is just incredibly angry and mean-spirited. Among other things, Melchior says that Social Security pays a lot of money to people who never claim to be disabled. I suppose that's true if you're talking about retirement and survivor's benefits but it's certainly not true if you're talking about disability benefits. She mostly writes about a book published by Charlie Binder on Social Security disability benefits. I haven't read the book but it certainly sounds harmless. However, Melchior describes it as a "rotten little book" and says that it shows that Binder has a "radical political stance" basically because Binder thinks that Social Security, particularly disability benefits, is a good idea and because he suggests that Social Security is not always fair to disability claimants. She objects to Binder advising claimants who go before an Administrative Law Judge to answer only the questions they are asked. Melchior must have had no experience with lawyers. This is standard legal advice for anyone testifying in any sort of legal proceeding. I expect that it's been standard advice literally for centuries. I have to repeat that this piece is just incredibly angry and mean-spirited. Even if you're no fan of Binder and Binder, you'll find this attack disgusting.

Senate Moving Forward With Appropriations Bill Covering Social Security

     From the summary of a bill pending before the Senate Appropriations Committee:

Social Security Administration (SSA): The bill includes nearly $12 billion, an increase of $534 million, for SSA’s administrative expenses. This includes a $441 million increase for program integrity activities and a $93 million increase in core administrative expenses for SSA to keep pace with an aging population and record-high workloads.

     This bill was marked up in Subcommittee yesterday. It will now go to the full committee.
     The House of Representatives has yet to produce a draft appropriations bill covering Social Security. However, the House's budget plan for the Labor-HHS appropriations, the one that covers Social Security, is 25.9% lower than the Senate Labor-HHS appropriation bill.
     The Senate bill would worsen service at Social Security. A 25.9% decrease in Social Security's operating budget would lead to unimaginable consequences.

Don't Count On The Disability Trust Fund Going Bust In 2016 -- Or Ever

     Since I noticed that payments from the Social Security Disability Trust Fund have reached near stasis, I've been wondering about that projection from Social Security's Chief Actuary that the Disability Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2016. If you look at that projection, one of the first things you notice is that there isn't just one prediction. There are three. The one commonly cited is the "intermediate" prediction that the Disability Trust Fund will run out of money in 2016. Another is the "high cost" or pessimistic prediction that the Disability Trust Fund will run out of money in 2015. Another is the "low cost" or optimistic prediction that the Disability Trust Fund will not run out of money. That's right. The optimistic projection is that even though the Disability Trust Fund is losing money now, that this situation will turn around before the Disability Trust Fund ever runs out of money.
     How do the three projections look given the actual results so far in 2013? Let's compare:
2013 Actual -- through May:
Income 2013: $48.1 billion, an increase of 4.7% over the equivalent time period last year
Outgo: $58.4 billion, an increase of 3.0% over the equivalent time period last year

Pessimistic Projection: 
Income total for 2013: $110.2 billion, an increase of 1.0% over 2012
Outgo total for 2013: $147.0 billion, an increase of 4.8% over 2012

Intermediate Projection: 
Income total for 2013:$111.4 billion, an increase of 2.1% over 2012
Outgo total for 2013: $144.8 billion, an increase of 3.2% over 2012

Optimistic Projection:
Income total for 2013: $112.5 billion, an increase of 3.1% over 2012
Outgo total for 2013: $142.8 billion, an increase of 1.8% over 2012

     Thus, the increase in income so far in 2013 is much greater than even the optimistic projection while the outgo is a little better than the intermediate projection, suggesting that the optimistic projection would probably be the closest of the three projections to what has happened so far in 2013. Even that may understate how good these numbers are. I was comparing the first five months of 2012 with the first five months of 2013 to get that 3.0% increase in actual benefit payments but if you look at the last nine months, there's actually been a 0.6% decrease in disability payments!
     There's another, simpler way of looking at this which confirms the trend line shown above. The pessimistic projection was that the Disability Trust Fund would go down by an average of $3.1 billion per month in 2013, the intermediate projection was $2.8 billion per month and the optimistic projection was $2.5 billion per month. So far in 2013, the Disability Trust Fund has gone down by an average of $2.3 billion per month, which is significantly better than even the most optimistic projection of the Chief Actuary.
     Of course, what happens over the course of five months won't necessarily tell us what will happen over the course of the next few years but unless you're expecting a new economic downturn or a big increase in disability claims, things are looking pretty good for the Disability Trust Fund at the moment. If you're a Republican don't get excited about the prospect of using the exhaustion of the Disability Trust Fund as a means of forcing major cuts in Social Security disability benefits. That may never happen. If it does happen, it probably won't happen until after the 2016 election and that's a long way off.