Well-Meaning Advice Can Still Be Misleading

    Tom Margenau has written a syndicated column giving advice on dealing with Social Security. Mostly I agree with him but the column is an example of how something that is good advice for most people can be misleading for others.

     Margenau recounts complaints from Social Security employees about claimants who call in to file claims for widows benefits who haven't bothered to find their husband's Social Security number (SSN) before calling. He says to find it before calling. Great advice for most people but what if you can't find that number? What if you were separated and lack access to any of your late spouse's records? What if you're divorced but were married long enough to get surviving divorced spouse benefits? Are you barred from filing a claim since you lack the SSN? No, you can still file the claim. Social Security can look up the SSN. It's certainly better to save their time by finding the SSN if you can but if you can't Social Security is still prepared to help you file the claim. Margenau goes on to recommend that claimants have not only the SSN but also date of birth, date of marriage, date of divorce  and date of death. I'm pretty sure that while it would be best to have this information that it's not strictly speaking necessary.

     You have to understand that I'm constantly dealing with clients who have already procrastinated for months if not years before filing a Social Security disability claim. Often the reason given for the procrastination is that they were trying to get their information together to file a claim. The claimants often wait to reach out for help from someone like me until they're destitute. That's irrational but people who become disabled often act quite irrationally. Mental illness causes this irrationality but just the dislocation coming from what is often an abrupt change in one's life brings about mental confusion. I wish I had had the opportunity to insist that claimants get on with it before the wolf gets to the door. Dealing with desperate clients who are facing homelessness is wearing. You want to do something for them immediately but while Social Security can expedite adjudication in cases of homelessness or threatened homelessness, it still takes months for a case to proceed through the process. Please, don't encourage procrastination in filing Social Security claims.

A Little Help Needed

     From WSAV:

78-year-old Sheila Conary says it’s been a long seven months in terms of her finances. It started in June of 2019 when she was told by her bank (Wells Fargo) that her account was short.

“I noticed I was getting insufficient funds in my checking account and I thought that can’t be because I’ve got money in there,” Conary told me.

But she was wrong. Four Social Security checks for the months of February, March, April and May had not been electronically deposited as normal. After going to the local Social Security Administration office she was shocked by the information they provided.

“When I went to Social Security they said they couldn’t help me,” said Conary. “They told me I should go to the Bank of America and said my funds had been diverted to an account there, that the change had been set up online by me. I said ‘no I never did that’ and told me I don’t have a Bank of America account.”

She now knows that someone somehow was able to go online to Social Security and change her deposit information. ...

She says seven months later, part of the situation has been resolved, i.e. that as of June her checks went back to her own Wells Fargo account.

“But I’m still missing February, March, April and May (checks) so over $8,000 is still sitting in Bank of America under some account that I didn’t open,” Conary says. ...

     Yes, she should have noticed it earlier but Social Security should have been far more helpful. Why was she initially told Social Security couldn't help her? Why hasn't her money been restored? No, Social Security doesn't have to recover the money before making Ms. Conary whole. This wasn't her fault. Her situation isn't rare. It's happened many thousands of times across the country.

Was Social Security Actually Issuing Decisions On Christmas Day?

     My firm has gotten two or three decisions supposedly issued by Social Security on December 25, 2019. I'd call that a dead giveaway that the dates that the agency puts on decisions are at best an approximation of the date they're actually mailed. I don't think anyone but a few security guards and computer people were working at Social Security that day and no one could have mailed a decision because the mail doesn't run on Christmas day. 

     I think this has to do with centralized printing and mailing. My guess is that the people actually making the decisions just put artificial dates on them assuming they'll be printed and mailed within, let's say, three days after they're ready to go out. Maybe the system does this automatically. Sometimes the printing and mailing people get it out on that date. Sometimes they get it out earlier; sometimes later. Who cares? Claimants have a fixed length of time to file appeals based upon when a decision is mailed. When it comes to appeal rights Social Security takes the dates on its decisions quite literally when it shouldn't

     Why is it that centralized printing and mailing is a good thing anyway?

Why Would An ALJ Do This?

     Why would an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) issue a recommended decision instead of just a decision, as is normal, when there is no basis in Social Security's manual for issuing a recommended decision. The manual says to not do this but I hear that it's not unusual for a few ALJs to do this. What is their thought process? Literally asking for a friend. It's not my case.

"We Don’t Need Fewer Entitlements For The American Middle Class. We Need More."

     From Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, former Treasury Secretary and former economic advisor to President Obama, writing for the Washington Post:

Few economic virtues are more universally applauded than thrift.

Going back at least to Ben Franklin, Americans have equated greater thriftiness with greater worthiness. Progressives decry the limited saving and wealth accumulation of middle-income families ... Conservatives applaud thrift as an aspect of self-reliance and propose ideas such as health-savings accounts to help families prepare for emergencies. Moderates believe universal social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which they label as entitlements, should be modest or even curtailed out of fiscal prudence.

In the current economic context of extremely low interest rates, however, these views are more wrong than right. The federal government should provide more, not less, social insurance. If it did, the result would be reduced inequality, a more secure middle class and a stronger economy.

The real challenges that keep middle-class families up at night are retirement, economic dislocation and supporting their children as they go to college and then buy a first home. These ... are not best met by personal saving. Rather, a generous and well-functioning society in which Social Security meets retirement needs, appropriate unemployment and wage insurance programs cushion economic shocks, adequate public funding holds down college costs, and health insurance has generous coverage would greatly reduce the need for most households to save.

It is highly inefficient to rely on individual saving rather than universal public programs to deal with life’s contingencies. Social Security, for example, pays out close to 99 percent of the revenue it collects in benefits. In contrast, individuals saving for retirement or the proverbial rainy day can over a lifetime dissipate as much as 20 percent of their savings in commission payments to financial institutions. Similar, and probably greater, efficiencies are associated with government provision of other forms of insurance.

There is the further point that self-reliance is an especially implausible way to deal with catastrophes such as disability or the loss of a good-paying job without the availability of an alternative. Genuinely preparing for such contingencies would involve building up a large nest egg at a substantial cost in terms of current consumption. Meanwhile, the feared contingencies never arise for most people. That’s why pooling risk through insurance is the best strategy. ...

We don’t need fewer entitlements for the American middle class. We need more.

Problems With Government Issued Debit Card Leave Many Without Access To Social Security Benefits -- And Notice How Long This Elderly Woman Had To Spend At A Social Security Office Trying To Get The Problem Resolved

     From CBS Chicago (emphasis added):

An 80-year-old Chicago woman is still fighting to access her Social Security money days after CBS 2 first got involved. It is because of debit card problems that CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov reported Monday are plaguing people across the country.

Ida Walker was frail and exhausted as she left a Social Security office on Monday. On Friday, a Social Security Administration employee told Walker to go in person – so as finally to solve a problem she has had with her U.S. Direct Express debit card, which is linked to her Social Security funds.

Walker spent three hours in the Social Security office on Monday. ...

She and her granddaughter have spent three weeks calling the U.S. Direct Express to activate a replacement card – only to get the runaround.

It meant she was cut off from her funds....

Based on the response we got to our initial story about Ida Walker’s frustrating attempts to access her Social Security funds and activate her Direct Express card, hers is not an isolated case.

Kozlov heard from a dozen people, by phone and email, who have the same problem.

“A Direct Express nightmare across the country,” one person wrote. Another reported that they lost hope.  ...

We’ve learned the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service renewed its contract with Comerica Bank in 2015, with that contract set to expire last week.

The contract’s cost to taxpayers, according to a Treasury Inspector General audit, is $38 million to $42 million. ...

Walker’s granddaughter said they talked to a Comerica employee Monday evening, who said the problem is finally being resolved. A representative blamed the matter on a fraud protection trigger.

Social Security Fraud Pays For A Silver Bentley

     There are two stories today.

     First, Rowena Isabel Lokeni of Orange County, California has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. Lokeni had fraudently diverted $176,015 in Social Security benefits to herself while working for the Social Security Administration.

     Here's the second story, from FA Online:

On Youtube, the happy-go-lucky family that goes by the name B.E.A.M. Squad seems to have everything—1.3 million subscribers, a sprawling Palm Beach, Fla. home, exotic travel and a silver Bentley—but they also have a dark, criminal past: According to a 2019 plea deal with the Social Security Administration, they were indicted and arrested for multiple felonies which included stealing Social Security money and filing phony tax returns.

Losses to the SSA and the Internal Revenue Service totaled almost $94,000, court documents show.

Billy Altidor, 29, and Evanie (Eva) Louis, 27, admit that in 2014 and 2015, they stole Social Security benefits owed people old enough to be their grandparents, according to their plea deal. A third defendant is awaiting trial.

The defendants accessed, or attempted to access, My Social Security online accounts belonging to more than 1,400 people, prosecutors said. ...

Union Leader Castigates Saul

     From an op ed in the Baltimore Sun by Ralph de Juliis, head of the union local that represents most Social Security employees:

... While the president has blustered and obfuscated through his first term, Trump-appointed Cabinet officials have waged a war on the federal workforce that has undermined our productivity, driven down morale and villainized the very employees who show up every day to serve the American people. ...  

Now under threat is the Social Security Administration thanks to administration decisions that will ultimately harm employees and drive up wait times for Social Security recipients under the guise of good public relations. Social Security Administrator Commissioner Andrew Saul announced that the agency would extend office hours to the public on Wednesday afternoons in more than 1,100 field offices around the country. He followed this announcement with a promise to hire 1,100 new employees, claiming that the new hires would directly impact the efficacy of our field offices. ...

But this fallacy falls apart when one takes a closer look. Only a fraction of those new hires will go toward telecommunications centers, and none to the field offices, which are already severely understaffed. On top of that, the Social Security Administration has experienced a yearly attrition rate of nearly 4,000 employees over the past four years, meaning the hiring numbers that are promised aren’t exactly what they seem. The most insidious part of Commissioner Saul’s announcement is the fact that he has placed a hiring freeze on the agency, which is still in effect, preventing the agency from replacing the workforce we’ve lost to the private sector, retirement or other opportunities.

Our field offices had coped with this staff shortage by setting aside time on Wednesday afternoons for employees to address and finish open claims. By opening up these hours to the public, employees will be inundated by new cases, increasing the backlog and elongating wait times for the American public. While Commissioner Saul takes a victory lap, public servants around the country only see their workload increasing. The result is worker morale plummeting by the day. ...

Social Security employees deserve a leadership that understands the issues we face and is dedicated to our mission to provide the best possible service to the American people. That leadership doesn’t exist in Commissioner Saul. That’s why we call on Congress to hold hearings on the agency under Commissioner Saul’s tenure, reopen our contract, and bring the Social Security Administration back to the bargaining table.

     It's not just me asking why the House Social Security Subcommittee hasn't held even one oversight hearing in this Congress.