Can Someone Translate This Into English?

     From FCW:

The Social Security Administration is moving forward with back-end tech and records systems to support the agency's long-term plan to modernize and improve customer service. 

As SSA continues to invest in its online help and customer services, the Customer Engagement Tools record system will collect and store electronic communications between SSA personnel and beneficiaries with "my Social Security" accounts. 

The database, which will be developed in-house, will also allow SSA's customer-facing systems quick access to user data. 

A Social Security spokesperson told FCW the agency anticipates the system will be ready for use in fiscal year 2018, and that 10 percent of current my Social Security account holders will be able to access the CET system in its first release.

FICA Receipts Hurt By IRS Budget Problems

     From the Fiscal Times:

A new report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released this week highlights the problem and suggests that the IRS may still be doing too little to go after employers suspected of hiding wages and failing to report billions of dollars in federal payroll taxes, including for Social Security and Medicare. 

The inspector general analyzed 137,272 cases from tax year 2013 in which there was a glaring discrepancy between employee wage and withholding information reported to both the IRS and the Social Security Administration and found that the IRS declined to investigate most of the possible fraud. According to the inspector general, the IRS intervened in only 23,184 of those cases, or just 17 percent of the total. ...

   And it's going to get worse since the IRS budget keeps getting cut, allowing abusive schemes to flourish.

Lots Of No Bid Contracting At Social Security

     According to a piece in The Hill by David Williams only 58% of Social Security's contract spending is awarded based upon competitive bidding.

Disability Insurance Income Saves Lives

From Disability Insurance Income Saves Lives by Alexander Gelber, Timothy Moore and Alexander Strand: 

We show that higher payments from U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) reduce mortality. Using administrative data on all new DI beneficiaries from 1997 to 2009, we exploit discontinuities in the benefit formula through a regression kink design. We estimate that $1,000 in annual DI payments decreases the annual mortality rate of lower-income beneficiaries by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points, implying that the elasticity of annual mortality with respect to annual DI income is around -0.6. These mortality effects imply large benefits that have not been taken into account in the welfare analysis of DI and other social income insurance programs.

Do Big Backlogs Help The Disability Trust Fund?

     The Hill asks the question: Is the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund doing better because increasing backlogs slow down the number of claims being approved? The answer is pretty clearly yes to some extent although there are more important factors. 

    I think one overlooked factor is that the long backlogs and harsh adjudicatory environment deter people from filing claims. Few people stop work due to illness or injury and file a disability claim immediately. There's usually a lag time that can be anywhere from a few months to a few years. A perception that the process is difficult and unpleasant can cause people to hold off longer in filing claims. I wish some investigator would look into this. You'd only need to look at the difference between claim date and alleged onset date and chart the difference over time. You could then correlate that with backlogs and approval rates. My guess is that the result would be interesting.

NADE Newsletter

    The National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE), an organization of the personnel who make initial and reconsideration determinations on Social Security disability claims, has posted its Summer 2017 newsletter.

Vet Cut Off Disability Benefits

     From the Rapid City Journal:

For 31-year-old Wayne Swier, a U.S. Army combat veteran who suffered devastating injuries from an improvised explosive device seven years ago in Afghanistan, this summer should have been a season of solace and celebration. 

But fate and a federal agency seemed to have conspired to turn it into a nightmare. 

Swier is set to marry his sweetheart in a week, and the couple plans to move into a new home near Johnson Siding built by the nonprofit Homes for Our Troops later in August. ... 

Instead, in May the Social Security Administration deemed him no longer disabled and cut off his monthly disability checks, in a manner as harsh as the way that IED blew off his leg in a small Afghan village in November 2010. 

Today, Swier is essentially broke, behind on his rent, his credit cards are maxed out, and just last week, power was cut off to his Box Elder rental home due to nonpayment, meaning he couldn’t even recharge his robotic prosthetic leg. Although his electricity has since been restored thanks to Black Hills Energy, the man’s problems have not been resolved. ...

     No, the article doesn't explain what his VA benefits situation is or why he's not drawing interim benefits from Social Security.

Five Common Myths Debunked

     Finally, something from the Motley Fool on Social Security that's worth reading. Matthew Frankel debunks five common myths about Social Security. My only bone of contention is that I wouldn't call these myths so much as I would call them right wing lies.