Can They Do This?

     On November 4 my firm received a Title XVI fee by direct deposit. On November 22, Social Security reached back into our bank account and took the money back without any prior notice. We've received no written notice from Social Security about this event.

     Fee overpayments happen from time to time. Typically, we get a notice to return the money. We do. In fact, we’ve generally returned the money even before receiving a notice. I've never seen Social Security just grab the money. Has anyone else seen this? Can they do this?

Four People Taken Ill At Nashville Field Office But Problem Quickly Solved

     From a television station in Nashville:

Four people have been treated after feeling ill by a reported odor at a social security administration office in Nashville, the Nashville Fire Department (NFD) says.Crews were first dispatched to the social security office on Cumberland Bend around 10:15 a.m. Thursday, when someone smelled the odor and called NFD.

The cause of the odor was determined to be hydrogen sulfide, also called sewer gas, the source of which was a dry plumbing trap. ...

     What's a plumbing trap? You have drains in bathrooms in office buildings. These drains are connected to sewer systems which are full of sewer gas which is nasty stuff. The gas is kept out of the building by a P trap or something like a P trap that depends upon some water caught in the trap to keep the gas out. Let the water evaporate and the gas gets in the building. Run some water into the trap and the problem is solved. Cleaning crews are supposed to take care of this but sometimes forget.

The Invisible Dog Named Timmy

     From The Spectator:

The Social Security office in Detroit is a dispiriting place done up in industrial grays. It is filled with the long, glum faces of those who molder in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy waiting for some faceless bureaucrat to help them. ...

Into this purgatory enters Gus Malone, a raggedy 52-year-old homeless man, along with his invisible dog Timmy. Gus parades Timmy up and down the gray carpet of the waiting room as if it were the competition floor of the Westminster Kennel Club. ...

Here, Gus casts a sideways glance up at the government clerk who is sitting behind the bulletproof glass, wanting to be sure she is taking all this in. But it appears that imaginary dogs are as common at the Social Security office as daffodils in spring. The bureaucrat bats not an eyelash at the dog who is not there.

Gus has come to the Detroit office to file a disability claim with the federal government, hoping to hit the jackpot of all jackpots — $771 a month, every month, for the rest of his natural-born days.

Gus then admits that there really is no Timmy. It is a ruse that he characterizes as ‘playing crazy’. The invisible-dog bit may be the dollop of perceived schizophrenia that will fast-track his application directly to the top of the ‘approved’ basket. ...

For all the electronic chatter about the comeback of Detroit, it is hard to see it here at the Social Security office, miles from the refurbished office towers of downtown where the artificial beach, deck chairs and outdoor cocktail stands have become something of a surrogate Puerto Vallarta for the skinny-jeaned millennials who work the cubicles there. ...

The Motor City is hardly alone. Nationwide, more than 8.5 million people of working age collect a federal disability check. The phenomenon has been dubbed the ‘disability-industrial complex’. Consider: more is paid for federal disability claims than for welfare and food stamps combined. It is into this army of have-nots that Gus hopes to enlist. ...

      A few thoughts:

• I guess Gus is real but I've seen a few contrived psychiatric disability claims but I don't think that I've ever seen one as ridiculously contrived as the one described here.
• It's actually quite difficult to get Social Security disability based upon psychiatric illness. It's almost impossible to get a claim approved if the claimant isn't receiving active treatment. 
• What are the odds that Gus will be willing to see a psychiatrist for treatment even once, much less on a regular basis?
• What are the odds that Gus could fool a psychiatric professional for a minute? I'll answer that one since I may have some readers who have less than no knowledge of psychiatry. The answer is NO!
• Assuming Gus is real, he really may have serious psychiatric illness; just not the sort of thing he's acting out. There are "gild the lily" claimants who are quite ill but who add a layer of contrivance on top that makes it harder to get them approved. Factitious disorder is itself a real psychiatric illness. 
• My experience is that the vast majority of homeless people have serious psychiatric problems. Sometimes, it's substance abuse that won't qualify for disability benefits but mostly it's other problems.

Former Commissioner Hardy Passes

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast <Commissioner.Broadcast@ssa.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2019 1:59 PM
Subject: The Passing of Former Commissioner Dorcas Hardy

A Message to All SSA and DDS Employees 

Subject: The Passing of Former Commissioner Dorcas Hardy

I regret to inform you that former Commissioner Dorcas R. Hardy passed away on Thanksgiving Day after a long illness.   

Dorcas had a long and distinguished career in both the private and public sector.  In 1986, President Reagan appointed Dorcas as the Commissioner of Social Security.  She was the first woman confirmed to this role.  Just prior to leading SSA, Dorcas served in the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary for Human Development Services at the Department of Health and Human Services.  She had previously served as Assistant Secretary for Health of the California Health and Welfare Agency during Reagan’s governorship and had begun her career as a legislative assistant to former New Jersey Senator, Clifford Case.

During her tenure as Commissioner, Dorcas spearheaded several significant initiatives, including the launch of SSA’s National 800 Number, the Enumeration at Birth program, and the Personal Earnings and Benefits Estimate Statement (now known as the Social Security Statement).  She continued her commitment to SSA through her 14 years on the Social Security Advisory Board, where she offered her considerable expertise on programmatic and policy matters.

 

I appreciate Dorcas’ legacy at SSA and invite you to join me in keeping her loved ones in our thoughts.

Andrew Saul
Commissioner

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

     Mike Causey at Federal News Network has written a column titled Teleworking: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. He mostly writes about the situation at Social Security. Here's an e-mail he received from a Social Security employee:

As if the telework situation could not get any worse, the administrator is having the top managers over [at] the Security West building send us moderately threatening emails. One went out yesterday. Speaking to us like we children, he told us that we were to be committed to our work and that our numbers have increased since 2018. It is scary and menacing. He wants the managers to walk up and down the aisles while we work to intimidate us. They don’t want to do this but are threatened as well.

“[SSA Commissioner Andrew] Saul is angry that we are fighting back through the media and senators. I am writing everyone. Our building does not service the public over the phone. We do claims, etc. He stated that he ended telework because the work could not be tracked, which is a lie. Here in the payment center we have a paperless system where we process work and the manager can see the movement in real time as well to see if we actually worked the cases. They would contact us while we teleworked so we were managed. Anyone caught abusing the system was removed. It was as simple as that.

Now we are back in the office and we are being harassed for no reason. Can anyone help us? People want to retire right and left before their time. He does not realize how serious this can be as we need people. We only hire about 50 to replace 300. [It] takes two to three years to be proficient. Truth is I think he wants the system to fail. — Just Plain Joe

Dumb Decision By Commissioner

     Social Security has issued a press release boasting about Commissioner Saul improving service by keeping the agency's field offices open all day on Wednesdays.

     I think this decision by Saul qualifies as one of, if not the, most bone-headed actions I can ever remember a Commissioner taking. This isn't going to improve service. It's going to hurt service. I'm pretty sure Saul did this not merely because he lacks understanding about how Social Security's field offices work but because he was unwilling to listen to those who do. I'm pretty sure all of those who do know advised against this. It also comes from an unshakeable belief that federal employees are lazy and that if you just crack the whip, you'll get better work out of them. That's naive. Inevitably in a large organization there are a few bad eggs but Social Security's service delivery problems come almost 100% from not having enough employees.

     If you're like Saul and don't have an understanding about how field offices work you probably think that almost all the work a field office does is done while a claimant is sitting across the desk from a Social Security employee. A lot of it is but certainly not all. Let me give a few examples:

• Claimant has been approved for Supplemental Security Income. Information is needed from a former employer or a family member in order to compute the benefits. A field office employee has to make some calls.
• A claimant who has been overpaid mails in a check to pay down the overpayment. Someone has to enter that information into the agency's computer system and forward the check on to another office that completes action on the payment.
• A woman contacts the field office wondering whether she can get benefits on the account of her husband. He disappeared for unknown reasons eight years ago. The Social Security employee who has the case remembers something from their training years ago about this sort of situation but has to spend time looking at the agency's manual to determine how to handle this sort of case.

     These and a thousand other types of tasks some mundane, some unusual, some taking only a little time, some taking a lot of time aren't done while a claimant sitting across the desk from the field office employee. You can't find that time if you've got a waiting room full of people many of whom are visibly impatient from having waited a long time to talk with someone. Things pile up. They don't get done. You don't gain by having the office open more hours; service actually get worse.

     As you can tell if you read this blog, I'm extremely interested in the Social Security Administration giving better service to the public. Unlike Andrew Saul I actually know something about how the agency functions and I know this isn't just counterproductive. It's dumb, dumb, dumb. It's OK that Saul doesn't know exactly how things work at Social Security. What's not OK is that he clearly didn't listen to experienced staff on this one.

    

Starving DDS

     A letter published in the Newsletter (not available online to non-members) of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives:

I am the state lead for the SOAR program in North Carolina. SOAR (SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery) trains case managers to assist people experiencing homelessness with applications for Social Security disability benefits.

Recently, it came to my attention that 33% of the positions at the North Carolina DDS [Disability Determination Services] are vacant. These positions include: 

• DDS specialists, 
• Supervisory positions, 
• Medical consultants, 
• Psychological consultants, and 
• Office assistants.

NC DDS must receive approval from SSA Headquarters to hire for vacant positions. NC DDS is not allowed to hire without that permission, including hiring to backfill positions where people left the agency or retired throughout the year. This hiring policy led to an ongoing deficit in filled positions at the agency. For example, in the last year (2018-2019) DDS lost 63 employees and only received permission to hire 18 people. For the coming budget year (2019-2020), NC DDS has received approval for only 36 hires. This amount still does not cover the number of people who left last year, and if any employees leave NC DDS this year, their positions will not be able to be filled, resulting in a greater net loss for the agency.

Secretary Cohen at the NC Department of Health and Human Services sent a letter to the SSA Acting Commissioner in November 2018 regarding the staffing issues. The response came back from the SSA-Atlanta region that they were working to provide additional hiring authority after the budget was established which resulted in authorizing 18 hires for the year and did not address the 63 losses.

Despite the staffing shortage, NC DDS continues to receive a high volume of applications. The high number of vacant positions leads to increased caseloads for DDS specialists which presents more challenges in processing applications. The stress of managing high caseloads causes more staff attrition, continuing the cycle of vacant positions.

Every year, SSA provides DDS agencies with a staffing and hiring allocation that is tied to their projected workload. However, DDS agencies do not have the authority to backfill positions that are vacated throughout the year. These positions are already a part of the approved spending plan so do not require additional funds.

A national SSA/DDS Strike Force team was convened in 2018 to address concerns regarding hiring. A recommendation of this SSA/DDS Strike Force team was to allow hiring authority of positions lost due to attrition, as long as it was within a DDS agency’s current funding total. This recommendation was tabled by SSA until all DDS agencies could receive budget training. However, now that all DDS agencies received this training, SSA decided that they will not implement this recommendation.

To date, I have reached out to the North Carolina Congressional delegation, SSA headquarters, and the US Interagency Council on Homeless programs (USICH) regarding the vacancies in North Carolina’s DDS. The USICH is interested in finding out more about the issue and possible solutions but need to know if other DDS agencies in the country are facing similar vacancy rates.

If you are in another state that has a high vacancy rate at your DDS agency, please contact me so that I can connect you to the USICH staff who is working on this issue. Similarly, if you are in a state that has resolved a similar issue, please contact me as well so we can learn from your experience.

I appreciate your assistance with this matter.

Thank you,

Emily Carmody

Project Director

NC Coalition to End Homelessness

emily[at]ncceh.org

More Than A Year Since The Last Oversight Hearing

     I  checked to see when the House Social Security Subcommittee last held an oversight hearing. It was September 28, 2018, with Republicans still leading the Subcommittee.  The Subcommittee has certainly held hearings this year but they have all been focused on legislation to improve Trust Fund financing and improve benefits. That is a worthy goal but there is no chance for passage in this Congress and uncertain chances in the next Congress.

     I don’t remember ever going this long between oversight hearings.