Not Keeping Up

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

4% Error Rate In Computing SSI Attorney Fees

     From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

For the 250 randomly sampled Title XVI claims involving claimant representative fees, SSA withheld fee s from claimants’ past-due benefits and paid the fees directly to the claimant representative. However, our review found that SSA did not always pay the appropriate amount when it paid the claimant representative fee on concurrent Title II and XVI claims. As a result, when SSA overpaid the claimant representative, it generally underpaid the claimant. Similarly, when SSA underpaid the claimant representative, it generally overpaid the claimant. 

Of the 250 sample claimant representative fees, 10 (4 percent) had claimant fee payment errors totaling $13,020: $12,479 in overpayments and $541 in underpayments. The payments ranged from a $3,062 overpayment to a $484 underpayment. Based on our results, we estimate that 15,200 claimant representative fee payments had about $19.8 million in payment errors for Calendar Years 2011 and 2012.

We acknowledge that computing past-due benefits and the related claimant representative fees may be complex, as staff is required to analyze a multitude of factors and make various decisions to pay the past-due benefits and fee. ...

Shouldn't They Ask What The Claimants Want?

     I find Larry Kotlikoff's pieces on Social Security to be ridiculously sensationalized. I rarely link to them. However, even though he's hyping this one too much, I still think he's onto something:

Despite our best efforts, we continue to be shocked by new horror stories about the Social Security Administration (SSA) that our readers bring to our attention. The latest galling example is one of the worst we've ever seen, and involves how the agency decides what to do when someone wants to defer benefits. 

Readers of our book know that we are big believers in delaying benefits where possible. If someone delays claiming their retirement benefit until it reaches its maximum value at age 70, their monthly benefit will be 76-percent higher — in inflation-adjusted terms — than if they claim at age 62, which is the earliest age at which normal retirement benefits may be taken. 

 Now, we've just learned, to our amazement, that Social Security is denying the delayed benefit wishes of some applicants and is instead forcing them to accept six months of retroactive benefits and a lifetime of lower benefits thereafter. Some beneficiaries may not even be aware that this is being done to them. This is a colossal injustice. ...
 Say someone comes in to their local Social Security office a few months shy of their 70th birthday and, as we're all told to do, gives the agency a head's up on their filing intentions....

 Instead of accepting their application for benefits to begin at age 70, the agency's representative instead gives the person a six-month retroactive payment! This act resets the person's entitlement back to what it was six months prior and wipes out half a year of Delayed Retirement Credits (DRCs). ...

We brought this to the attention of Jerry Lutz, the former Social Security technical expert who has reviewed nearly everything Larry has ever written about Social Security. Jerry consulted the SSA operations manual that sets forth agency policies and came back as amazed as we were.

"Based on SSA regulations, retroactivity is automatically applied to applications filed after FRA unless retroactivity is expressly restricted by the claimant," he wrote.

Some Technical Questions

     At one time if a document was scanned in color and submitted to Social Security's Electronic Records Express (ERE) system the document would remain in color in ERE. When medical records arrive in my office in a fuzzy state I have been scanning them in color not because the documents were in color but to try to make them more legible once uploaded to ERE. Documents scanned in color have a higher resolution than documents scanned in black and white. Does ERE still retain documents scanned in color in their native format or does it now degrade them to black and white? 

     While I'm at it, has the resolution ERE is using changed? Maybe it's my eyes but it seems like ERE records have gotten more difficult to read. I'm wondering if documents I'm uploading in a normal black and white resolution are being degraded to a lower resolution. 

     You might ask why Social Security would intentionally degrade documents uploaded to ERE. The answer is that higher resolution documents take up more storage space. When they're transmitted they take up more bandwidth. Storage space and bandwidth are important to network managers. Document legibility isn't of so much concern to them since they don't have to read the documents.

It's Only Fiction

     A recent Orange Is The New Black episode featured a misleading segment touching on Supplemental Security Income for children. I've been around long enough to know that it was never easy to get a child on benefits due to Attention Deficit Disorder-Hyperactivity (ADHD). It's now impossible. Sure, there are children with ADHD who get on benefits now but they're not getting on due to ADHD. They're getting on due to other problems.

IRS Proposes ABLE Regulations

     The Internal Revenue Service has issued a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making (NPRM) on ABLE accounts. ABLE accounts will allow contributions to accounts to help disabled individuals drawing Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration. These regulations as well as new state statutes are needed so that ABLE accounts can be established.

Isn't This Michael Astrue's Fault?

     From Fox News:

On paper, it sounded like a true government success story: The Social Security Administration in September opened a "state-of-the-art" data center in Maryland, housing wage and benefit information on almost every American, "on time and under budget." 

However, six years after Congress approved a half-billion dollars for the project -- the largest building project funded by the 2009 stimulus -- a whistleblower says the center was built on a lie. 

"We misled Congress," Michael Keegan, a former associate commissioner who worked on the project, told FoxNews.com. 

Officials originally claimed they needed the $500 million to replace their entire, 30-year-old National Computer Center located at agency headquarters in Woodlawn, Md. But Keegan says they overstated their case -- the agency has no plans to replace the center, and only moved a fraction of the NCC to the new site.  ...

Keegan maintains the agency didn't have to move anybody out of the NCC, and could have simply renovated the floor holding the old data center. 

"The data center occupies one half of one floor in a four-story building," he told FoxNews.com. "We didn't need to build [the new center] to begin with." ...

Acting Commissioner Carolyn Colvin said in a deposition she "did not" know of any plan to abandon the NCC or move all its workers to another site. Other officials echoed this statement. ...

Former SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue, who led the agency under President George W. Bush and for several years under President Obama, also said he's not sure why the building isn't being replaced entirely. 

Astrue said he made the original decision to replace the NCC, toward the end of the Bush administration. He said the building was "antiquated and fraying," and was worried a disruption in payments could send "the entire economy into recession." A backup SSA center in North Carolina, he said, was not enough. 

Astrue said his intention was to replace and phase out the NCC entirely, and disputed Keegan's claims that Congress was misled. He maintains the proposal was the "correct decision." 

But he said he was "surprised" to learn the NCC is still in operation. He doesn't know why. ...

When the Office of the Inspector General reviewed Keegan's complaints, it concluded the SSA "did not mislead" Congress to believe the NCC wouldn't be needed. At the same time, the OIG acknowledged SSA talked about "replacing" the center and "did not implicitly state" it would stay in use. (Further, while IG Patrick P. O'Carroll, Jr., oversaw the spending, he also was among those making the case for the project, telling Congress in 2009 the NCC was "rapidly approaching obsolescence.") 

Like the OIG, the Office of Special Counsel last year also said they could not determine whether agency leaders misled Congress. Keegan disputes these findings.

     So what did Carolyn Colvin do wrong? She didn't order employees to make an unnecessary move to an unnecessary new building which was built at the insistence of her predecessor. If there's fault here, it's on Michael Astrue who insisted on building this expensive new structure instead of using stimulus money to hire additional personnel to work down the agency's backlogs. Much fault should also be laid at the door of the many members of Congress who were active cheerleaders for building the new National Data Center. My recollection is that Republican members of Congress were the biggest supporters of the new building. They always prefer spending money on contractors to spending money on hiring needed personnel.

Representation Crisis In Kentucky

     If you thought all those former clients of Eric Conn whose Social Security disability benefits are being cut off can just go to Legal Aid for representation, think again. Legal Aid doesn't have anything like the resources. It might be interesting if hundreds of law students were turned loose on these cases.