New 1696 But Where Is It?

     From EM-2004 issued on Friday:

We are publishing a revised Form SSA-1696, Claimant’s Appointment of a Representative. The revised SSA-1696 incorporates information from the Form SSA-1695 and the Form SSA-1696-U4 and has two new supplements: SUP1 (Claimant’s Revocation of the Appointment of a Representative) and SUP2 (Representative’s Withdrawal of the Acceptance of an Appointment). The supplements are already available online in fillable format.

The revised SSA-1696 updates and reorganizes all parts of the older form SSA-1696-U4, and collects additional information about the appointed representative (AR) from the Form SSA-1695. The consolidation of these forms facilitates the collection of comprehensive data on a single form for faster and more accurate processing.

We incorporated the SSA-1695 into the revised SSA-1696 to reduce manual steps, encourage earlier submission of payment information, and minimize loss of personally identifiable information. Upon publication of the revised SSA-1696, we will make Form SSA-1695 obsolete. Processing of the SSA-1695 requires multiple manual steps that can lead to errors. In addition, ARs often submit the form late in the administrative process, which in turn, can delay the authorization of fees (note that neither the hearing office nor the Appeals Council can process the SSA-1695). Finally, for AR’s who have registered, the new Form SSA-1696 allows for the use of the Representative Identification (RepID) instead of the AR’s Social Security Number (SSN). We have included space for the RepID on each page of the revised SSA-1696, which will make easier to associate pages that become separated during transmission with the proper claims file. ...

     Despite what this says, I'm not seeing the new form SSA-1696 online.

Interview With Commissioner

     The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has posted an interview it did with Andrew Saul. Here are some excerpts with emphasis added:

... On one of my first field trips, I happened to notice on the door that we closed at 12 o'clock on Wednesdays. I frankly couldn't believe it, because we were losing basically 10 percent of our available time to service our customers by being closed on Wednesday afternoons. ...

The 800 number, that has been a major problem, major concern for all our customers. If you called in, you would find you had an unacceptable waiting time — sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes. So, what we've done is we've immediately hired about 1,100 new operators.

Our call time right now is down by about 50 percent. We've got farther to go, but I think if you watch over the next six months, we will get the call centers down to the proper waiting time, which will be close to zero. That's a prediction that I'm willing to make here, and I believe we will succeed in doing this. ...

We're reorganizing how the offices operate and how we handle the customers from the time they walk in the door. If you look at our field offices, over a third of our customers come in for card replacements, and another 20 percent come in for benefit statements. So we are now working on a process where customers coming in for a simple task like that are routed to an express agent, and they don't have to sit there and wait in the office for an agent who deals with more complicated tasks.

This sounds so simple, but if you think about it, almost 50 percent of our customers coming into the offices were waiting like somebody that had a very complicated problem, which is crazy. ...

Quite frankly, I don't think that we did the job we should have done [in fighting scams] over the last few years as this problem arose. ...

We have to modernize our disability operation. Some of our regulations are 40 years, 50 years outdated. We had a workforce 50 years ago that was very different than it is today: many more manual tasks, much more hard labor, for example, many more mining jobs, much more manufacturing. Today, it's much more office work.

Also, don't forget, health care has completely changed in the last 50 years. Fortunately, some diseases that affect a lot of people today, 50 years ago, if you were diagnosed with that disease, you were finished. Today, a lot of productive people have had serious strokes, heart attacks, cancer. Very, very life-threatening diseases. Today, we have medicine that has really cured the problems and allowed people to go on with very successful lives.

It's important that the disability plan services those people that really are in need of it, and that are really in bad shape. ...

     I think Saul is sounding two clear theme:

• The people who came before him were idiots who couldn't see simple solutions to problems, which is very Trumpian.
• He believes anybody can do office work and that's about all that's left in the U.S. economy and, besides, medicine has dramatically reduced the amount of disability, so there shouldn't be so many people drawing Social Security disability, which is very naive.

A Mother’s Plea For Help

     The New York Post has published a letter from a woman seeking help with a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) problem. Her circumstances are a bit unusual but the problem or at least the reduced payment problem is common. Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

Maria [her disabled daughter] turned 18 in November, and we applied for her disability on Sept. 5, 2019. At the request of the Social Security office, we returned for a follow up on Dec. 5. During the visit, I had explained to the officer that Maria would be paying $325 a month for rent and an additional $145 for utility expenses. 

The officer told me not to worry about the delay in receiving payments, and that the Social Security office would pay retroactively to October 2019. 

Yesterday, I received an SSI check dated Dec. 27, 2019, for Maria for $514. I have tried to contact both the local office and the main Social Security office to find out why the payment is for the reduced amount and why there is no payment for October or November.

     I’m seeing more and more of these one-third reduction problems. It’s like the field offices are being told to apply a one-third reduction regardless of what they’re told about the financial relationships. 

NADE Newsletter

     The National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE), an organization for those who make initial and reconsideration determinations on disability claims for Social Security, has released the Winter Edition of its newsletter.

A New Spammer Wrinkle

     I received this alarming report anonymously:

We have an office ... that began being inundated with calls yesterday, resulting from spoofers using the FO [Field Office] GI [General Information?] line in caller ID.

Several of the calls received today related to the  spoofing  report that when the public answers the call, a recording comes on and tells them their SSN [Social Security Number] has been suspended.  If they want more information, they can push  1.  

When they push 1, their call is actually routed to the field office GI line. The FO staff conjectures that this in essence sets up a three-party call with the perpetrator muted and listening in.  In other words, the spoofers are directing someone to our office in hopes SSA staff would ask the public identifying questions to check to see if their SSN has been suspended while they listen to the call.

Low Profile Guy Nominated To Low Profile Position

     The White House has announced that William G. Dauster has been nominated to be a public member of the Board of Trustees of the Social Security Trust Funds. Dauster is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served in various staff positions in the Senate and White House. I'd call this a ceremonial position except that there really isn't any ceremony involved. Social Security's Office of Chief Actuary prepares the annual report on the Trust Funds. The Trustees sign off on it. I suppose someone in this position could ask questions of the Actuary or issue public pronouncements but I doubt that anybody would care. The position is little more than a formality.

He'll "Always Protect" Social Security Until He Doesn't

     From the Washington Examiner:

President Trump said during his State of the Union address that he would "always protect" Medicare and Social Security, despite saying just last month that he would be open to cutting the entitlement programs.

In late January, during an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Trump was asked if cuts to entitlements would ever be in consideration, he answered yes.

“At some point, they will be,” Trump said, before highlighting U.S. economic growth. “At the right time, we will take a look at that."

Trump went on to suggest that he would consider cutting spending on Medicare, the federal government's healthcare program for the elderly.

“We’re going to look,” he said.

During his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, however, he said the opposite.
"And we will always protect your Medicare, and we will always protect your Social Security. Always," he said. ...

Trump Administration Completes Action On Inability To Communicate In English Rule

     The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has completed its review of Social Security's proposed final rule which will remove inability to communicate in English as a criteria in disability determination. The rule was approved and should be published in the Federal Register in the near future.