Happy Easter!

Conn's Idiot Assistant Pleads Guilty

     From the Washington Times:

A man who helped the orchestrator of the largest Social Security fraud in U.S. history cut off his ankle bracelet and flee the country pleaded guilty Friday to his role in the escape, admitting he’d spent months working to set it up. 

Curtis Lee Wyatt had been the muscle for Eric C. Conn, a Kentucky lawyer who authorities say ran a fraud ring that totaled well more than $1 billion in bogus Social Security disability claims. ... 

Wyatt, 48, assisted along the way, helping arrange the getaway car and making test-runs to see which border checkpoint would be the easiest for his boss to escape through on his journey out of the U.S. 

Wyatt also arranged for Conn to have a Faraday bag — the device that allowed him to shield his ankle bracelet when he cut it off, this avoiding detection by the monitoring service. ...

Sorta Like Being The Acting Acting Commissioner

     Seen on the signature line of a routine Federal Register item posted today:

Nancy Berryhill, 

Deputy Commissioner for Operations,

performing the duties and functions not reserved to the Commissioner of Social Security. 

Trying To Use Social Security Number Misuse To Criminalize DACA People

     From the Washington Times:

... [P]ublic support for a DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] amnesty appears to be widespread, based in part on the public perception that “Dreamers” have committed no crime other than illegal entry.

In fact, it is likely that many if not most DACA applicants who held regular jobs had committed the crime of perjury, by providing their employers with a stolen or fake Social Security Number (SSN) for tax reporting purposes. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has estimated that 3 out of every 4 illegal aliens possess an SSN that belongs to somebody else.

When U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting DACA applications on Aug. 15, 2012, applicants were required to complete a standard work authorization form that required applicants to “include all [Social Security] numbers [they] have ever used.” In other words, many DACA applicants would have been obliged to confess in writing that they had committed a felony.

However, as soon as this potential disincentive to apply for DACA was brought to the administration’s attention, USCIS rushed out a statement that they were “not interested” in identifying individual violations of “some federal law in an employment relationship,” and they amended their DACA website to limit the reporting of SSNs by DACA applicants to those “officially issued to you by the Social Security Administration.” ...

At the time, DACA supporters might have argued that Social Security fraud by Dreamers, while a crime, did not directly harm any American citizen. What they may not have known, because it was concealed, was that on Aug. 23, 2012, just eight days after DACA commenced, the administration ordered the Social Security Administration (SSA) to suspend its decades-old practice of notifying employees by mail if the name and SSN under which their wages were being reported by their employers did not match the name and SSN in the SSA’s own records.

Many SSN “mismatches” are due to identity fraud, which means that many Dreamers were at risk of receiving mismatch letters from the SSA. Since awareness that they had been “flagged” as identity thieves might well have dissuaded them from disclosing their whereabouts in a DACA application, suspension of the SSA program was a logical add-on to the other actions taken by the administration to prevent fear of identity-theft prosecution from depressing DACA applications. ...

Although the SSA’s mismatch program was suspended on Aug. 23, 2012, the suspension was not made public until more than four years later, on Sept. 16, 2016, as the Obama administration drew to a close. Even then, the fact of the suspension was buried in a footnote to an SSA Records Maintenance notice and, until now, was virtually unknown outside the SSA. Evidently, the Obama administration was not keen to advertise its decision to risk the loss of Social Security benefits for millions of American workers rather than risk dissuading a few hundred thousand Dreamers from applying for DACA. ...

     Social Security number misuse by DACA people isn't a victimless crime. False wage reports can cause significant problems for the legitimate  number holders. However, drawing DACA people out into the open so that they use legitimate Social Security numbers eliminates the misuse. It has to be the most effective way of reducing the problem.
     This piece in a right wing newspaper suggests two possible future courses for the Trump Administration -- prosecuting DACA people for Social Security number misuse committed before DACA or using that misuse as justification for deporting DACA people. Either way it starts drawing Social Security further into immigration enforcement and nobody who cares about Social Security wants that.
     If the DACA people were all from Norway, would this issue be raised? I don't think so.

Only 7.8% Of Disability Benefits Recipients Have Bachelor's Degrees

     Social Security has just published National Beneficiary Survey: Disability Statistics, 2015. It contains a table from giving the educational backgrounds of recipients of the disability benefits it administers:

• Did not complete high school or GED 28.3%
• High school diploma 42.6%
• GED 7.7%
• Special education certificate 4.1%
• Some college or postsecondary vocational 13.7%
• Associate's degree or vocational diploma 7.5%
• Bachelor's degree 4.9%
• Some graduate work or graduate or professional degree 2.9%

I Keep Telling You The Disability Work Incentives Are Too Complicated To Administer

     Social Security has recently published National Beneficiary Survey: Disability Statistics, 2015. It contains a jarring statistic on what happens when a recipient of disability benefits returns to work. When that happens and the person's disability benefits are supposed to be adjusted because of the work, 53.2% of the time Social Security gets the adjustment wrong and overpays or underpays the claimant.

H.R. 4547 To Become Law

     The Strengthening Protections for Social Security Beneficiaries Act of 2018, H.R. 4547, having to do with representative payees has passed both houses of Congress unanimously and should be signed into law by the President soon.

DCPS Project Not Going Well

     From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

In September 2017, we reported that SSA [Social Security Administration] planned to deliver functionality [of the Disability Case Processing System or DCPS] to support all workloads — including continuing disability reviews and DDS [Disability Determination Services] disability hearings — by April 2018. Since then, SSA has discontinued rolling out DCPS to additional DDSs and re-prioritized its resources to focus on development. The Agency’s new strategy concentrates on increasing the number of DCPS users at participating DDSs and the number of cases the system processes. 

On January 27, 2018, SSA deployed another major release into production. The Agency reported this release added functionality to support most adult and child initial and reconsideration claims. As of February 28, 2018, 10 DDSs had processed 6,477 disability cases using DCPS. Based on SSA’s cost estimates, as of February 2018, cumulative costs for the new DCPS project were about $80 million. This does not include SSA’s costs to develop the prior version of DCPS. 

As of February 2018, the Agency expected development would continue beyond October 2018. In addition, SSA had not determined when it would resume deploying DCPS to additional DDSs. As of February 2018, SSA estimated its DCPS costs through Fiscal Year 2022 would be about $140 million. However, given the uncertainty of when SSA will finish developing DCPS and rolling it out to all DDSs, we could not determine whether the Agency’s cost estimate was reasonable. Furthermore, until SSA completes DCPS development and implementation, DDSs will continue incurring costs to operate and maintain their existing systems