An Obscure Question

     Sometimes I upload PDF versions of photos of a part of a client's using Social Security's Electronic Records Express (ERE) system. I do this to demonstrate the client's physical impairment. It might be photos of swollen ankles or severe angulation following a poorly healed bone fracture. In one memorable case, it was astonishingly extreme gout.
     Photos to demonstrate physical impairments work only if they can be viewed in color. I've seen color PDFs uploaded to ERE stay in color in years past but then that seemed to stop. However, I've recently seen an ERE file that included medical records that had color documents in it that stayed in color.

     What's the deal? Will color PDFs uploaded to ERE stay in color or not? Is there some special technique to use?
     Update: A friend provided a link to a section of Social Security's POMS manual which recognizes that some ERE documents need to be in color. It mentions scanning them in color. However, I know I've seen color documents converted to black and white by Social Security's system. In fact, up until last week I don't think I had seen anything in color in ERE for years.

Interesting

    Unlike Social Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs will stop processing new claims for benefits during the federal shutdown.

     I've said it before. Keeping the most visible parts of federal agencies open during federal shutdowns reduces the political costs of shutdowns, making them more likely to happen and longer when they do come. If everything other than prisons, law enforcement and the Military were shut down, we wouldn't have shutdowns. Stop the Treasury from paying contractors and see what happens. Just shut down air traffic control and see what happens.

What It's Like

     From a blog post by Kale Sastre:

I am a young, seemingly vibrant 27 year old woman. I have a Master’s degree, am fluent in both English and Spanish, and have experience working a variety of jobs, ranging from retail to teaching at a university. I have many interests and abilities, including writing, reading, researching, working with kids and serving people in my community. And I am currently in a situation where I am destitute and desperate. ...

Well, there’s something else about myself that I haven’t mentioned yet. I am severely and debilitatingly disabled, with a myriad of confusing and frustrating issues I still desperately hope are solvable. It took a long time for me to swallow my pride and apply for disability benefits, which I did over a year ago, six months after I left the job I could no longer reliably show up for. That leaves me with a year and a half so far with absolutely no income, waiting to hear back from the disability office. ...

I know many people believe the lies I believed before I found myself in this situation. We believe disability benefits are there to provide for those who can’t provide for themselves, and that people who are legitimately disabled can receive them. The only time anyone should be worried is if they’re not actually disabled. ... The longer I wait for this process to be completed, the more I realize this isn’t true. Disability is extremely tedious and difficult to get on, regardless of how disabled or desperate you are. ...

I’ve been told that people who legitimately need help can get it, and everyone else is just lazy, fraudulent, or freeloaders. This is a lie. ...

     Ms. Sastre is smarter than many of my clients who, even they have endured the delay, worry and frustrations involved in applying for Social Security disability benefits, still believe that there are lots of freeloaders drawing disability benefits. How often do I hear something like "Why can't I get disability. I've got a neighbor down the street and there's nothing wrong with him and he's getting disability?"

Social Security's Shutdown Plan

     We're now in a federal government shutdown. Here's Social Security's shutdown plan. Click on each thumbnail to view full size.
     The two things I notice is that this time almost all of the Office of Hearings Operations (OHO) will stay open but that almost all of the Office of General Counsel (OGC) will shut down. Last time both mostly shut down but were eventually called back in.

     I'm mostly glad to see OHO stay open. However, there's a part of me that says that ameliorating the effects of a shutdown like this makes the shutdown longer. If virtually the entire federal establishment were actually shut down, the shutdowns would be rare and brief. 

     The OGC shutdown is more of a problem than you might think. Social Security is subject to deadlines in federal court litigation. OGC has enough of a problem meeting these deadlines in the best of times. Federal judges are not as sympathetic to the agency's shutdown problem as you might think. The judges, their staffs and the clerks offices always keep working during these shutdowns. They can't see why OGC would shut down. 

Acting Commissioner's Message On Possible Government Shutdown

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 10:37 AM
Subject: Planning for Potential Lapse in Funding

A Message to All SSA Employees

Subject: Planning for Potential Lapse in Funding

As many of you are aware, annual funding for the government expires on January 19.  The Executive Branch does not believe it is necessary for a lapse in funding to occur, and looks forward to working with the Congress to finalize appropriations for this year.

However, prudent management requires that we be prepared for all contingencies, including the possibility that a lapse could occur.  A lapse would mean that a number of government activities would cease due to a lack of appropriated funding, and that a number of employees would be temporarily furloughed.  To prepare for this possibility, we are working to update our contingency plans for executing an orderly shutdown of activities that would be affected by a lapse in appropriations. 

Thank you for your hard work, dedication, and patience through this process, and for all that you do for the Social Security Administration and the American people.

Nancy A. Berryhill
Acting Commissioner

Shutdown Tonight?

     The federal government will shut down tonight if Congress cannot agree on a continuing resolution to fund the government. 

     The last time there was a shutdown almost all Social Security employees were told to keep working. The major exceptions were employees of the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (now Office of Hearings Operations -- OHO) other than the Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) and most of the Office of General Counsel (OGC). Even without passage of a funding bill almost all the ODAR employees were eventually recalled last time. The OGC employees were recalled just before passage of a continuing resolution. Social Security asked the state Disability Determination Services (DDS) to stay open and they did for a time but some started closing down as the shutdown continued.
      If you're a Social Security employee, please let me know what you're hearing. My guess is that most of you have no idea whether you're supposed to show up for work Monday and may not find out until Monday morning.
     By the way, I don't care what your politics are, a shutdown is completely nuts, almost incomprehensible. 

An Undying Husband

     From Ann Brenoff writing for Huffpost:

For the past 12 months, your tax dollars have been going to pay Social Security benefits to a dead man. I know this because that dead man is my late husband.

No, I am not engaging in any sort of attempt to defraud the Social Security fund. Quite the contrary, I reported his death to the Social Security Administration immediately after it occurred and have been reporting it repeatedly ever since.

None of my two dozen or so calls ― or the day I took off work to visit my local Social Security office and paid $13 to park ― has changed the fact that, as of this writing, the SSA continues to deposit a monthly payment into the checking account I shared with my dead husband. In fact, they also continue to pay his Medicare premium out of his benefit payment. ...

I reached out to my congressman, who was miraculously able to move a few mountains. We are still ironing out the errors that have compounded over the months and working on mitigating the longer-term impacts: For instance, why should I have to wait months for a corrected 1099 form on benefits that were paid in error and that the agency now wants back? ...

     By the way, has anyone ever received a corrected SSA-1099? Is that even theoretically possible? Also, by the way, in her piece Brenhoff eventually veered off into somehow blaming the agency's POMS manual for her problem, which, I guess, helps demonstrate a point that she was trying to make -- that few people understand how Social Security works.

SSAB Report On Rep Payees

     The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB)has issued a 46 page report on Improving Social Security's Representative Payee Program. Here are their recommendations:

Recommendations to SSA [Social Security Administration]: Š 

• Standardize the capability determination process by using empirically-based assessment and decision-making methods. Š 
• Establish a centralized process to certify new FFS [Fee For Service] organizational rep payees instead of having each FO do its own certification. Š 
• Research and evaluate the order of preference for rep payee selection. Š 
• Implement a plan to achieve full compliance with SSA’s criminal bar policy within five years. Š 
• Examine the effectiveness of the criminal bar policy and continue to strengthen it as an appropriate monitoring device. Š 
• Create specialized rep payee expertise at the FO [Field Office] and/or regional level to administer the rep payee program more uniformly, to answer questions and train new rep payees and to manage organizational rep payee workloads. Š 
• Develop strategies to inform the public of resources related to the SSA rep payee program and how to report suspected abuse. 

Recommendation to Congress: Š 

• No longer require all custodial parents and legal guardians of minor children and spouses residing with adult beneficiaries/recipients to submit an accounting report annually. Instead, these rep payees would be required to submit accounting reports upon SSA’s request. SSA will request accounting reports from at least five percent of the total exempted group each year, with selection done on a partly randomized and partly targeted basis. SSA would develop data and procedures for targeted selection of cases for accounting-report submissions and reviews. SSA will also develop a process to notify regularly all rep payees in the exempted group of their reporting responsibilities, their being subject to audit, if selected, and their need to maintain an ongoing account of how Social Security benefits are spent. Š 
• Increase oversight of contracted monitoring through the inclusion of measurable performance standards to assess the monitoring process, including the development of quality, timeliness and quantity standards and a method of assessing compliance with those standards. 

Recommendation to Congress and SSA: Š 

• The performance of analytical models that are used in the monitoring processes should be periodically examined and judged by experts outside of SSA. Experts conducting this work should provide findings to Congress. Š 
• Improve the design of the annual accounting form and monitoring of all rep payee and organizational rep payees with annual reporting requirements.

Recommendations to OMB [Office of Management and Budget]: Š 

• Study how best to coordinate the management of federal benefits for people who have been determined to be financially incapable with the recognition that alternative approaches such as supportive decision making have been embraced by key stakeholders. Š 
• Consider the creation of a shared database for federal benefit-paying agencies and state and local courts that make guardianship decisions. The database will assist in improving financial capability determinations, rep payee selection and oversight of the program.