What Do You Think?

     Here is a question for readers:

Mr. Smith is found to have lung cancer. He has part of a lung removed and has radiation and chemotherapy. Soon after the cancer was discovered, Mr. Smith applies for Social Security disability benefits. The claim is approved. By seven months after he stopped work, Mr. Smith is over the surgery and the chemotherapy and radiation therapy, Mr. Smith is feeling better. He's not sure that he'll be able to work but he wants to give it a try. He returns to his old job. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith finds that he can't handle his old job. He's just too short of breath and he gets tired out too quickly. He stops after two months. Mr. Smith informs Social Security of his attempt to return to work and its unsuccessful outcome. They do nothing. His checks continue. What should have happened?

1. Social Security did the right thing. Mr. Smith should not be punished for his brief, unsuccessful attempt to return to work.
2. Social Security should have said that Mr. Smith was ineligible for Social Security disability benefits until his attempt to return to work ended and declared him overpaid for the months of benefits paid before that date.
3. Social Security should have ended Mr. Smith's benefits permanently and declared him overpaid for any benefits he received.

      If you chose 1, that Mr. Smith should not be punished for his unsuccessful work attempt, you chose the correct answer under current law. If you chose 3, that Mr. Smith should be made permanently ineligible for disability benefits because he made an unsuccessful attempt to return to work, you made the same choice that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made in producing a report saying that Social Security made $1.3 billion in overpayments to Social Security disability claimants. If you chose either 1 or 2, you believe that the GAO report is misleading.
      By the way, this sort of unsuccessful attempt to return to work is common. I'll guess that at least 10% of claimants do it, perhaps as many as 25%.

     But, forget what answer is correct under current law and which answer the GAO chose. Which answer makes most sense to you as a public policy matter?

Free Web poll for your Web site - freepolls.com

Depends Upon How You Want To Look At It

     From the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

A congressional panel that earlier this year criticized judges for lavishly awarding Social Security disability benefits might have been talking about Tennessee.

It depends how you crunch the numbers.

Nearly two-thirds of administrative law judges in Tennessee grant benefits to more than half the sick and injured workers who come before them, federal figures show. ...

But there's another way to look at it, a local disability attorney said: Judges are the back-up for a high turn-down rate at the first stage of the application process.

Though the disability rate among Tennessee workers is about a third higher than the national average, the state has the second-lowest rate in the nation for initial approval of disability claims, figures from the Social Security Administration show.

Here's An Alternative If You Don't Like Having The Trust Funds Invested In Government Bonds

     From Slate:

A lot of coverage of the sale of Neiman Marcus by the private equity companies than own it to new private equity companies seems to me to be missing what's interesting here. David Gelles at Dealbook, for example, said the buyers are "a group led by Ares Management and a Canadian pension plan."

But it's not just a Canadian pension plan. It's the Canada Pension Plan.

Which is to say the luxury retailer has been bought by Canada's version of Social Security.

Pittsburg Office Closing

     The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the Pittsburg, Kansas Social Security field office is closing.

Hearing On Puerto Rico Fraud Allegations

     The House Social Security Subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for 2:30 on September 19 concerning the recent allegations of a number of fraudulent Social Security disability claims in Puerto Rico. The hearing notice says that employees involved in adjudicating disability claims noticed that they were receiving nearly identical medical reports on different claimants. The allegation is that the physicians involved were receiving $150 to $500 per fraudulent report. If that's true, all I can say is dumb, dumb, dumb. How stupid did they think Social Security is? Why would any physician with good sense risk serious criminal charges for such a small amount of money? Dumb, dumb, dumb. I'll bet that most of the claimants involved could have been approved based upon honest medical evidence. I've seen that sort of claimant. There aren't that many of them out there but they exist. It was once said of boxing promoter Don King that "... he would rather put a dishonest quarter into his pocket than an honest dollar." That's the mentality that some people have.

GAO Report Looms -- Actually, Now It's Here And It's Got Problems

     NBC is saying that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will release a study on Sunday (GAO releasing a report on Sunday?) saying that $1.29 billion in Social Security disability benefits were paid to 36,000 people who had too much income from employment to qualify for benefits.

     To those who deal with Social Security disability every day there is nothing surprising about this. Some disability benefits recipients don't report that they have returned to work. Some people say they have reported their return to work but Social Security didn't do anything -- and this was a major problem until a few years ago and may, to some extent, remain a problem. What is supposed to happen is that Social Security uses reported earnings to catch these cases, stop payment of benefits and declare overpayments. The problem is that Social Security doesn't have enough manpower to deal with this on a timely basis. Thus, people who shouldn't be getting benefits remain in payment status for years. You want to deal with this problem, give Social Security more operating funds. With sequestration causing further cuts in Social Security's manpower, the problem just gets worse. It's simple. Those who cry the loudest about this sort of thing are the same people who are most responsible for Social Security's inability to deal with this sort of thing on a timely basis.
     Update: The report was actually released today. The report notes that:

During this review, SSA [Social Security Administration] officials told us that limited resources and competing workloads may have constrained the agency’s ability to act promptly when it received earnings alerts or self-reported earnings for beneficiaries from our nongeneralizable examples described above. We also reported in April 2013 that budget decisions and the way SSA prioritizes competing demands, such as processing initial claims, contribute to challenges SSA faces in maintaining the integrity of the disability program.

     Social Security also told GAO that it thought that GAO's method for computing the amount of overpayments was unreliable and could lead to "substantial overstatement.". As an example of the problems with GAO's method, GAO assumed that anyone who performed work during their waiting period would never be eligible for benefits. Social Security's response was that in many cases work during the waiting period was short lived and would lead, at most, to finding a later date for onset of disability which would mean, at most, a small overpayment. GAO's report suggests to me that GAO did not even understand the point that Social Security was making. I'm pretty sure that GAO has never heard of an Unsuccessful Work Attempt (UWA). Anyone involved to a significant extent with the Social Security disability programs will realize that if GAO believes that every UWA makes a person permanently ineligible for benefits, the GAO report has to be seriously misleading. GAO's mindset seems to have been "If you work after the date you say you become disabled, you can't be disabled. Period. End of discussion. For good reasons that I won't belabor here, that's not the law, nor should it be the law. Things are far more complicated that GAO seems to have undersood. The problem is that GAO's report makes for a nice headline. SSA's response doesn't.

Big Theft Of Social Security Checks

     Tampa police discovered about 175 stolen Social Security benefit checks, totaling $165,926, at the scene of an attempted murder. The attempted murder appears to have been drug related. Local police report that a total of about 300 checks had been stolen. How they were stolen, what the thief or thieves intended to do with the checks and what happened to the other 125 or so checks is unclear.
     It couldn't be easy to cash even one stolen Social Security check. Banks and check cashing services demand to see ID before handing over cash or even opening an account. I don't know how you would cash dozens of these checks without getting caught but the jails are full of people who tried to do really stupid things.

Astrue's Role In Fighting Obamacare -- Also, Astrue's Own Federal Records Got Hacked

     You may have vaguely noticed that one aspect of the all out press by Republicans to prevent the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, from coming into effect is to insist that the data infrastructure for the health care exchanges is inadequate to protect our privacy. Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue appears to have had a role in this fight -- a role that began while he was Social Security Commissioner. He testified yesterday before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies of the House Committee on Homeland Security. I don't mean to suggest that Astrue has been simply behaving in a partisan way. His concerns seem to be based upon genuine problems in the data infrastructure, problems that may or may not be adequately addressed by the implementing agencies. These appear to me to be no more than the routine, predictable problems inherent in implementing a major new federal program but Congressional Republicans seem intent on puffing this into something much more.

     Interestingly, in his written statement to the Subcommittee, Astrue says, with no further explanation, that he "suffered through OPM’s [Office of Personnel Management's] inept response when my federal financial records were breached two years ago."