Most Of Eric Conn's Former Clients Aren't Taking Advantage Of Free Legal Help

     From WSAZ:

Attorneys representing hundreds of people fighting to keep their federal disability benefits worry those benefits may disappear for most of them if they do not have a lawyer.  

Last year, the Social Security Administration ordered nearly 1,800 people to attend hearings to determine whether they should continue receiving disability checks. Many have already gone through with the hearings and are now waiting on the results. 

The people are former clients of Floyd County lawyer Eric C. Conn. ... 

Thursday night, some of those people gathered in Prestonsburg, where they heard from the legal team trying to help them keep their disability payments. 

The prevailing theme was encouraging disability recipients who have not hired an attorney to represent them at their re-determination hearings to do so. ...

[Ned] Pillersdorf [who is handling a class action lawsuit on the terminations] estimates around 1,000 disability recipients do not have legal representation for their hearings and, as a result of not seeking counsel, will lose their hearings. ... 

"The suicide chatter is way up," Pillersdorf said. "It was especially bad around Christmas. Unfortunately people have got this unfortunate response that suicide is somehow a rational response to losing their benefits. We want to reassure people their lawyers are doing everything they can to help them." ...

     It would be great if the other 1,000 or so former clients of Eric Conn were to seek legal help. The problem is that at this point there wouldn't be nearly enough volunteer attorneys to represent them all. By this point, it's almost too late. Virtually all of these cases are now scheduled for hearings.

Beware! Social Security Is Using Docutector!

     From a contracting notice posted by the Social Security Administration:

This is ... notification of the Social Security Administration's (SSA) intent to issue, on a sole-source basis, a firm fixed-price contract to D.R. Myers Distributing Co., Inc. dba Driver's License Guide Company, to renew an electronic resource subscription entitled Docutector.

Docutector is an online document forgery detection database. SSA's Office of Media Management (OMM) will use the Docutector subscription as a visual standard to inspect documents submitted by claimants to detect and investigate fraud.

     I think the last dubious document case I saw at Social Security was a family Bible used to prove date of birth. The questionable entry was written by a ballpoint pen supposedly as a contemporaneous  recording of a birth that happened well before ballpoint pens were invented. Most of my readers have no experience with date of birth determinations, much less the concept of using a family Bible to prove date of birth. To explain, states weren't requiring birth certificates until about 100 years ago. Even after birth certificates were required, for some years there were still plenty of home births where no birth certificate was issued. School records, insurance records, census records and entries in family Bibles were used in these cases to prove date of birth for Social Security purposes. Laboriously gathering documents to make a date of birth determination used to be a significant part of what the Social Security Administration did. That's pretty rare these days, except for some immigrants, because all those folks who lacked birth certificates are now on Social Security benefits or deceased. My point is that fraudulent documents are quite uncommon at Social Security these days.

Income Inequality Hurting Social Security Trust Funds

     From The Atlantic:

The financial picture for Social Security isn’t as dire as some describe: Without any modifications to its funding, Social Security will generate enough revenue to pay for three-quarters of promised benefits. [There is enough revenue and reserves to pay full benefits until 2034.]

The main reason it’ll fall short, though—the reason that that remaining one-quarter of benefits hasn’t yet materialized—is that the method of funding for Social Security was calibrated to an America with much less inequality than the nation currently has.

Since the late ‘70s, most of the growth in workers’ earnings has gone to the people who have made the most money. To be precise, the wages of the top 1 percent of workers have grown 138 percent since 1979, while the wages for the bottom 90 percent grew only 15 percent during that period.

If all of that income growth were taxed evenly, Social Security would have no shortfall. But it’s not taxed evenly: Any dollar that an American earns beyond $118,500 is, under current laws, not subject to Social Security taxes. In other words, someone who makes $118,500 this year is going to pay the same amount in Social Security taxes as someone who makes $4 million this year.

Will SSA Accept Driver's Licenses From Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington As ID?

     A vaild ID is required to enter a Social Security hearing room. The REAL ID Act sets forth requirements for acceptable IDs. Generally, people have used their driver's licenses. However, I'm reading that driver's licenses from the states of Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington are not in compliance with the REAL ID Act requirements and may no longer be used to gain access to federal facilities. I'm getting this from a local newspaper article concerning access to Fort Bragg but I believe this should apply in the same way to access to Social Security hearings. Is there a problem in those states? This could be a big headache for Social Security and claimants from those states.

Same Sex Marriage Battle Continues

     From CNN Money:

Kathy Phelan has been waiting more than a year for her first benefit check from Social Security, caught in a back-and-forth with the agency as it works to keep up with a changing legal landscape for same-sex couples. ...

She last heard from the agency in December and was told it could be another 12 to 18 months before a hearing is scheduled on her case. Her claim was first flatly rejected and she has since appealed.

Phelan isn't the only one stuck in limbo with the Social Security Administration.

 "The process is moving inexplicably slowly," said Susan Sommer, an attorney for Lambda Legal, a non-profit that advocates for LGBT rights. ...

 Over the past two decades, there's been a patchwork of same-sex marriage laws across the country as more and more states made it legal. It wasn't until 2013 when the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that they could get federal benefits like Social Security as a married couple. But that still left some in the lurch if they were married in a different state than where they lived.

 That's what happened to Phelan. They married legally in Washington state in 2013, but lived in Arizona where same-sex marriage wasn't recognized until the middle of 2014. Since Kaye lost her battle with cancer five months before it was legal in Arizona, Social Security did not treat Phelan as her legal spouse. ...

 Why, exactly, does that impact Phelan's benefit? Because married couples are entitled to a "survivor" benefit if the higher-earning spouse died first.

Attorney Fee Payments Continue To Decline

     Social Security has posted its final numbers on fees paid to attorneys and others for representing Social Security claimants in 2015. The total was $1.094 billion. This was down $46 million or 4%, from 2014. Fees are down $335 million, or 23%, from their peak in 2010.
     All attorneys who practice Social Security law face considerable economic pressure. Almost no one is entering this field of practice now. The attorney fee provisions of the Social Security Act were designed to allow claimants to have representation. This right could be effectively eliminated over coming years unless something changes. One important way that the Acting Commissioner of Social Security could assure that claimants don't lose their right to representation is to increase the cap on Social Security attorney fees. It's currently $6,000. The Social Security Act allows the Acting Commissioner to raise this to adjust for inflation but does not require that she do so. If adjusted for inflation, the cap would now be over $7,000. It's past time to raise the cap.

Headcount Holds Steady

     The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has just posted updated figures for the number of employees at the Social Security Administration as of the end of the third quarter of 2015:

• September 2015 65,717
• June 2015 65,666
• March 2015 64,432
• December 2014 65,430
• September 2014 64,684
• June 2014 62,651
• March 2014 60,820
• December 2013 61,957
• September 2013 62,543
• June 2013 62,877
• March 2013 63,777
• December 2012 64,538
• September 2012 65,113
• September 2011 67,136
• December 2010 70,270
• December 2009 67,486
• September 2009 67,632
• December 2008 63,733
• September 2008 63,990

Lawsuit On Social Security Hearing Backlogs

     From a press release:

The attorneys and certified legal interns from Miami Law’s Health Rights Clinic have filed a federal suit against the Social Security Administration on behalf of 12 indigent and disabled clients who have been waiting as long as 26 months to secure a hearing or receive rulings from a Social Security judge.

The suit asks the government to compel the Social Security Administration to “promptly schedule, hear, and adjudicate” the claims of their clients. ...

Miami has the longest wait times in the country.  “We don’t know exactly why this is the case,” said Zach Lipshultz, a third-year law student in the Clinic, who is working on the case. “It might be due to a lack of administrative judges, or staffing, or something else with Social Security. It might also relate to the extreme poverty and extreme need for disability benefits in Miami-Dade County.” ...

     The problem with this lawsuit is that the Supreme Court ruled on something like it in 1984 in Heckler v. Day. The Court held that a class action could not be used to force Social Security hearings to be held within a time deadline. However, the Court did indicate that individual actions concerning delays at Social Security would still be allowed. It appears that the Miami case isn't a class action, just a normal civil action that happens to have a number of plaintiffs seeking relief. If bringing a lawsuit on behalf of a number of claimants works, expect to see such lawsuits proliferating around the country. 

     For those who think that the federal courts wouldn't possibly do something about the backlogs, don't be so sure. There is a right wing majority on the Supreme Court but the lower courts, including most Courts of Appeals, are increasingly dominated by Democratic appointees. If the Courts of Appeals keep ruling for the plaintiffs in such cases, the Supreme Court probably won't hear a case on the issue.

     By the way, at the time of the Day decision the average hearing backlog was only about nine months if I remember correctly, a fraction of what it is today.