I Warned You But You Didn't Listen

     When it proposed new regulations to force a claimant to make a decision on whether to accept a video hearing soon after a request for hearing is filed -- and long before a hearing is actually scheduled -- Social Security was implicitly making a bet that the result would be a decrease in the number of claimants objecting to video hearings. I warned at the time that the result would probably be the exact opposite, an increase in objections to video hearings. Those early choice letters started going out in my area in the last week or so. What I'm hearing so far from other attorneys and from claimants themselves suggests that Social Security is going to lose the bet it made. In my area, I looks like there will be vastly more objections to video hearings.
     So, what's next, mandatory video hearings with all the Administrative Law Judges herded into a huge warehouse where they only do video hearings and can be completely overseen by wise central office taskmasters?

Let's Simplify Work Incentives

     The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) has issued a proposal for simplifying and improving the work incentives in Social Security's disability programs. Here are the major points:

• Benefit offset level: $1 benefit offset for every $2 of earnings over the earning disregard threshold
• Earning disregard threshold: Initial earning disregard should be set no lower than the current law Trial Work Level (TWL) period earning threshold of $770 for 2014 ... The earning disregard threshold for SSDI should be indexed ...
• The earned income disregard in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program should also be increased to the level it would be at if it had been indexed since its inception. The earned income disregard in the SSI program should be indexed after it is increased.
• Eliminate the Trial Work Period. A Trial Work Period would no longer be needed with a benefit offset.
• Eliminate the Extended Period of Eligibility (EPE) ... [E]arnings should never cause an SSDI beneficiary’s eligibility to be terminated. Instead, benefit eligibility should be put in suspension in any month that a beneficiary’s earnings rise to the level that no benefit is payable. An SSDI beneficiary’s eligibility should only be terminated if the individual has medically improved and no longer has a disabling impairment according to the Title II definition of disability.
• We recommend improving the administration of the IRWE [Impairment Related Work Expenses] by making the reporting of IRWEs easier – allowing online submission of evidence of expenses that might be eligible to be counted as an IRWE and reducing the frequency at which someone must provide evidence of the IRWE – e.g. create a presumption that the expense continues at the same monetary amount unless SSA is notified. If needed, verification of the expense could be asked for annually.
• The current SSI blindness rule should be applied to both Title II and SSI disability claimants and beneficiaries to allow the consideration of all work expenses, not only those that are “impairment - related.”

     These are common sense reforms. They would make the work incentives much easier for claimants to understand and for Social Security to administer. Congress has added one work incentive after another over the decades. It's gotten to the point that almost no one understands the incentives and that includes front line Social Security employees. How can incentives work if the people you're trying to incentivize don't understand the incentives and there's no one available to explain them? It's time to take down this Christmas tree loaded with ineffective incentives and replace it with something simple and workable.

     I don't think this proposal if adopted will put large numbers of people back to work. The vast majority of Social Security disability recipients are too sick to have any realistic hope of returning to work. I do think that this proposal will make a difference on the margins and be much easier to administer. That's all anyone should hope for.

NCSSMA Newsletter

     The National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA) has finally posted its June 2014 newsletter online. I'll bet it was distributed to members months ago. NCSSMA is a major organization of Social Security management personnel. This issue of the newsletter contains a long interview with Kenneth Rivers, Social Security's Associate Commissioner for the Office of Telephone Services. Here's one small excerpt:

As NSBR [Network Skills Based Routing] rolls out across the nation, how will it enhance telephone service delivery for the FO [Field Office]

NSBR provides the ability to route incoming FO General Inquiry (GI) calls to other FOs within an SSA Region, before reaching the 15-min max wait time. We are nearly at 70% project completion for this effort, having installed this tool in nearly 800 FOs nationwide. NSBR has afforded us the opportunity to improve telephone service delivery by increasing call answering pools of available FO agents in neighboring offices throughout the country to assist and answer calls from the local public. To date, neighboring offices have answered over 120,000 callers, who might have otherwise walked into our FOs to receive the same exact service that they were able to receive over the phoned. Additionally, we minimize performance deterioration on our N8NN [National 800 Number Network] platform by deploying NSBR, so that FOs can assist each other. 

     Note the concern with the maximum 15 minute wait time on calls to Social Security Field Office. Apparently, that's the point at which the telephone system automatically disconnects you even if no one has talked with you. They're trying to route calls to other FOs before the callers are automatically disconnected.

Want More Effective Government? Hire A Million Bureaucrats!

     The excerpt below is from an opinion piece in the Washington Post written by John J. Dilulio, Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Dilulio served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush. This was abstracted from Diulio's book, “Bring Back the Bureaucrats."

 We all know that the federal government has gotten a lot bigger in the past half century. ...

And yet, the number of federal civilian workers (excluding postal workers) has barely budged. ... 

This is the dirty secret behind all those debates over the size of government. Yes, government is big and is dangerously debt-financed, but it is also administered by outsiders — and that is what guarantees that our big government produces bad government, too.

Post-1960 Federal America has become a grotesque Leviathan by proxy, in which an expanding mass of state and local government workers, for-profit contractors, and nonprofit grant recipients administers a vast portion of federal money and responsibilities.  ...

We don’t need fewer federal workers; we need more of them — a lot more. More direct public administration would result in better, smarter, more accountable government. ...

[W]ith little regard for performance or results, Washington’s proxies lobby for federal policies, programs and regulations that they are paid to administer. The proxies rarely lose, which is a big reason government never stops growing. ...

Today’s federal civil service is not bloated — it is overloaded. We have too few federal bureaucrats monitoring too many grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars. Many federal agencies are in crying need of more workers. By 2025, for instance, the number of Social Security beneficiaries will exceed 85 million , and the Social Security Administration will disburse nearly $1.8 trillion a year. But the SSA projects that it could lose a third of its workforce by 2020, when some 7,000 headquarters workers and 24,000 field employees become eligible for retirement. Unfortunately, in recent years, because of a congressionally mandated hiring freeze, the SSA has been unable to fill positions left open by employee retirements. ...

How many more federal bureaucrats are needed? Here’s a rough measure: In 1965, the ratio of full-time federal civil servants (1.9 million) to the total U.S. population (193 million) was about 1 to 100. In 2013, with a civilian workforce of 2.1 million and a U.S. population of 316 million, that ratio was about 1 to 150. The Census Bureau estimates that the nation’s population by 2035 will be about 370 million.

If the federal workforce grew back to its 1965 ratio, then by 2035 it would need to have 3.7 million employees. If, instead, the federal workforce merely maintained its 2013 ratio, then by 2035 it would have about 2.5 million workers. The midpoint would land the federal personnel roster at about 3 million by 2035, with roughly 1 federal bureaucrat for every 125 citizens.

Crude as it is, that calculation is probably in the ballpark of what’s needed: 1 million more full-time federal civilian workers by 2035.

Senate Finance Committee Clears Colvin Nomination

     The Senate Finance Committee has voted 22-2 to favorably report out the nomination of Carolyn Colvin to a term as Commissioner of Social Security. She is currently the Acting Commissioner. Senators Burr (R-NC) and Isakson (R-GA) voted against Colvin.

     The nomination is not out of the woods. This will not be taken up by the full Senate until after the election. If Republicans gain a majority in the Senate after the election, they may try to prevent almost all action in a lame duck session, perhaps including action on non-controversial nominations.

A Little Good News

     The Continuing Resolution (CR) passed yesterday by the House of Representatives allows federal agencies to continue spending at the same rate as in the fiscal year that ends on September 30 -- less 0.0554%. §101(b). However, the Social Security Administration is exempted from the 0.0554% reduction. §114 (b)(2).

Pete Peterson Launches Another "Bipartisan" Attack On Social Security

     From a press release:

Former Congressmen Jim McCrery (R-LA) and Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) today launched the McCrery-Pomeroy SSDI Solutions Initiative, a bipartisan effort to identify potential improvements to the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. 

The goal of the initiative is to provide policymakers with a menu of options to improve the SSDI program well in advance of the program’s 2016 projected insolvency date. The initiative will solicit ideas for concrete and practical reforms that improve various aspects of the SSDI program. The proposed ideas will be subject to a rigorous review process, be presented at a conference in 2015, and then published along with recommendations from the initiative co-chair. 

McCrery and Pomeroy both served as chairmen of the Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee during their time in Congress and have retained an interest in the SSDI program. The co-chairs will be advised by an Advisory Council of experts representing a diverse range of experiences and perspectives.

     This is coming from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). CRFB tries to appear bipartisan but it always favors budget cuts over increased revenues. It has a history of ties to tobacco interests and is heavily involved with Pete Peterson, a billionaire, who has been tirelessly and fruitlessly working for decades to undermine Social Security. This initiative will produce a report recommending slashing Social Security disability benefits.
     What is it with Earl Pomeroy? If you don't nominate me to become Commissioner of Social Security, I'll just switch teams?

An OIG "Special Report"

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a "Special Report" on The Social Security Administration's Ability to Prevent and Detect Disability Fraud. There are some small bits of news in the "Special Report" but it's mostly a stale rehashing of old news in an attempt to placate Congressional Republicans who want proof that fraud is rampant in Social Security's disability programs. Three isolated instances of alleged small scale schemes to defraud Social Security do not constitute proof of rampant fraud. It's merely a sign that there are stupid people who make the mistake of thinking that it's easy to defraud Social Security.

     Anyway, here's the few nuggets of news that I found in this "Special Report":

• "The Acting Commissioner and others have consistently and inaccurately cited a 2006 OIG report as the “best-available evidence” that the rate of fraud in the disability program is less than one-tenth of one percent. We are currently updating that 2006 report, and expect that our findings will give us more insight into fraud and abuse in the disability programs." Later in the report, OIG says, basically, that even though there's a report they issued some years ago that can be interpreted in the way that the Acting Commissioner interpreted it that she shouldn't have because maybe there are some overpaid claimants that OIG doesn't want to prosecute but who OIG still wants to label as fraudsters. Is it reasonable to call something fraud if you're not willing to prosecute it as fraud?

• "The Agency’s dated systems, combined with the diverse and unintegrated systems of 54 DDSs, provide little protection against the cookie - cutter approach to large - scale DI fraud conspiracies such as those in New York and Puerto Rico, where only vigilant DDS analysts were finally able to detect signs of a scheme after millions of dollars were paid to fraudulent beneficiaries."
• "This year, SSA began an initiative to develop predictive analytics to detect disability fraud."
• "SSA is currently working with three vendors: Northrup Grumman and SaS on the use of the predictative analytics tool, and Accenture regarding a joint anti-fraud unit."
• OIG has noticed that scanned images of documents don't contain searchable fields, meaning it's impossible to turn the powerful software that Northrup Grumman and SAS wants to sell the agency loose on all those scanned documents so why is the agency considering buying the software? That means that humans, who are actually pretty good at noticing patterns, will probably have to be the ones noticing the patterns.
• OIG wants "a comprehensive tracking and review process for all claimant representatives."
• "SSA is currently working with the Disability Researth Consortium and the Library of Congress in a literature review to look at how other disability systems factor in age, education and work history. The agency intends to update the vocational grids, used to establish disability and to identify other work that a claimant could perform."
• "In FY 2007, 19.6 percent of ALJs allowed more than 85 percent of their cases; in FY 2013, that percentage dropped to 2.9% of ALJs ..." What does this have to do with fraud? Also, did the percent of ALJs denying a huge percentage of the cases they heard go down in a similar way?