Andrus Sentenced

     From the Associated Press:

A former chief regional Social Security judge [actually Hearing Office Chief Judge] has been sentenced to prison for scheming to retaliate against an employee who blew the whistle on alleged fraud by a Kentucky lawyer. 

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports Charlie Paul Andrus was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison. 

Andrus pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with disability lawyer Eric Conn to interfere with a person's employment. Conn — at the center of a nearly $600 million Social Security fraud case — disappeared this past June. ... 

ALJ Register Opening

     From Government Executive:

... The Office of Personnel Management announced this week that it planned to open up applications for administrative law judges throughout government, aiming to replenish a register it maintains for the positions. ... 

SSA cannot resolve the problem simply by adding more ALJs, however, according to Association of Administrative Law Judges President Marilyn Zahm. While SSA must hire 100 judges each year just to keep pace with attrition, Zahm said even an influx above that level would not sufficiently drive down the backlog. 

A shortage of support staff, such as clerks and attorneys, is the driving force behind the growing number of outstanding claims. SSA imposed a hiring freeze in May 2016 ahead of fears that its budget would continue to shrink. It remained in place after President Trump issued a governmentwide moratorium upon taking office. While the agency received authority from OPM to bring on 200 support staff while Trump’s freeze was in place, Zahm said that was a “drop in the bucket” that barely kept pace with the departures taking place across SSA’s 166 hearing offices. SSA lifted the freeze in May, but is hiring on a limited basis for direct service positions only. ...

Early Out Offered

     From Government Executive:

The Social Security Administration is opening up separation incentives to nearly every job category across its workforce, with about one in four employees eligible to leave. 

The largest independent federal agency announced the early retirement offer in a June memorandum obtained by Government Executive. All employees who wish to take advantage must separate by Sept. 1. Only the agency’s 1,600 administrative law judges are not eligible to accept the offer. 

Employees must have 20 years experience and be at least 50 years old, or have 25 years of service and be any age, to qualify under the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority. ...

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.