The Greatest Of All Tools

     I am reminded that a college friend once told me that the hammer is the greatest of all tools because if you can't fix it with a hammer by the time you're done with it, it can't be fixed.

ODAR Workload And Performance Summary -- FY 2016 -- Rapid Deterioration In Service And SSA Doesn't Care

     This was obtained from Social Security by the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) and published in their newsletter (which isn't available online). Click on the image to view it full size.

     Note that they were getting in an average of 2,798 new cases per workday in fiscal year 2016 but only disposing of 2,545 cases per day. That's a 9% shortfall. The backlog increased by 61,107 cases over the course of the fiscal year. Those are real people, most of whom will ultimately be found disabled.

     Note that Senior Attorney dispositions totaled only 1,187 cases over the entire fiscal year. Social Security, you can pretend to credulous members of Congress that you care about the backlogs but don't try telling that to me. It's simple. If you care about the backlogs, you take the brakes off and increase the number of Senior Attorney decisions dramatically. If you're not willing to do that, you just don't care about the backlogs. Senior Attorney decisions are an excellent way of doing something quickly about the backlogs. They don't ultimately do anything other than quickly approve cases that would ultimately be approved anyway.

SSA Doesn't Make News Just Before An Election So Here's An Interesting Picture

NC Museum Of Art Park 11/6/16

By International Standards U.S. Spends Little On Disability Benefits

How Donald Trump Fumbled Social Security Like No Republican Before Him

RCALJ Oliver Garmon In The News Again

     An Atlanta television station is running a piece on employment discrimination at Social Security, featuring Regional Chief Administrative Law Judge Oliver Garmon.

Social Security News Remains Slow Just Before The Election So Here's Another Picture

From an exhibition of art deco cars at the NC Museum of Art

Mass Killing By Social Security

     From The News Advance of Lynchburg, VA (emphasis added):

The Luedkes — husband George and wife Ann — had just returned from vacation in late August when they learned the unthinkable.

Ann Luedke was dead, and had been for 12 years, according to the Social Security Administration. Within days, tens of thousands of dollars would be withdrawn from their joint bank accounts by the U.S. Treasury Department — repayment, the federal government reasoned, for Social Security benefits paid to Ann for the three years in which she had been drawing benefits.

“I don’t remember dying,” Ann said, laughing. “I would have noticed.” ...

On Sept. 6, Ann visited the local Social Security Administration office on Timberlake Road and met with an employee who found that Ann was declared deceased. Ann recalled that her record was partially corrected.

The next day, George and Ann visited the local office together. Later the same day, Ann received a voicemail by an employee in the local office informing her that she was among several thousand people affected by a system input error and the Social Security Administration was working on the problem. ...

[Social Security spokesman Daniel O'Connor] said he could not comment on the Luedke case specifically, citing privacy laws.

When speaking of the assertion that several thousand people were erroneously declared deceased, O’Connor referenced an audit conducted by the Office of the Inspector General in 2015 that raised concerns about the accuracy of death records collected by the Social Security Administration.

 The Social Security Administration reached out to five states — including Virginia — to conduct a pilot by which the agency sought to obtain “historical death data” to “further explore filling potential gaps in our records,” O’Connor said. In August 2016, the Social Security Administration posted approximately 40,000 death records from Virginia and two other states in the pilot. While around half of those records reflected true deaths that matched records of the Social Security Administration, it was discovered that some of the remaining 19,000 matches were in error, O’Connor said. ...

     Are you kidding me? Why has there been no public announcement on this? Why no Emergency Message? Did Social Security think no one would notice? Having one's name wrongly added to the Death Master File causes massive problems.