Today's Congressional Hearing

      Here's info on today's hearing before the House Social Security Subcommittee:

What:	Social Security Subcommittee Hearing entitled   “Save Our Social Security Now”
When:	1:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 24, 2020
Where:	This hearing will take place remotely via Cisco Webex  video conferencing.
Watch:	Livestream of the hearing can be viewed via live webcast accessible  at the Ways and Means Committee’s website. The webcast will not  be available until the hearing begins.

 Witnesses:

PANEL 1

• The Honorable Ron Wyden (D-OR)

PANEL 2

• The Honorable Danny K. Davis (D-IL)
• The Honorable Linda Sánchez (D-CA)
• The Honorable Judy Chu (D-CA)
• The Honorable Don Beyer (D-VA)

PANEL 3

• Nancy J. Altman, President of Social Security Works
• Will Goodwin, U.S. Army Veteran and the Director of Government Relations for VoteVets 
• Amy Matsui, Director of Income Security and Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center
• Janice Dean, New York, New York
• Max Richtman, President and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
• Robert Roach, President of the Alliance for Retired Americans

Chiropractors Charged In Disability Fraud Scheme

      From a press release:

Dr. Thomas Hobbs and Dr. Vivian Carbone-Hobbs of Jefferson County were indicted with two members of their office staff, a former union representative of Anheuser-Busch In Bev, and five patients with conspiring to fraudulently obtain disability benefits from the Social Security Administration...

 According to the indictment, the defendants exaggerated the patients’ medical conditions and ability to care for themselves in order to qualify for the government disability benefits and the private insurance disability payments. The chiropractors also required their patients to undergo excessive medical treatments and diagnostic evaluations beyond what was medically necessary to pad their medical records....

Beginning as early as 2011, AB In-Bev employees sought the chiropractors’ assistance because it permitted them to fraudulently obtain Social Security disability insurance benefit payments, a long-term disability insurance payment of $100,000.00 from Prudential Insurance Companies, and long-term and short-term disability benefits through Met-Life. In exchange, his patients paid him as much as $3,000.00 for each of the types of disability payments they were seeking in addition to insurance payments he collected from Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Health Care and payment for unreimbursed services from the patients.

The losses resulting from the false and fraudulent statements to the Social Security Administration and the private insurance disability providers exceeded $12,000,000. ...

Another Report On Rep Payees

     The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) has released a study it commissioned on representative payees at Social Security. Rep payees handle money for beneficiaries who are unable to handle it for themselves. Most often a rep payee is a grown child or other close relative who handles the money responsibly but improper or illegal conduct by rep payees isn't as rare as anyone would like. The study is fine although its first recommendation, more studies, is part of the tradition of scholars making such self-serving recommendations when they do research for the federal government.

     Unfortunately, there are three underlying problems with rep payees that no one seems to be able to do anything about:

• There are some claimants who don't have anyone close to them who is willing to be rep payee. If some stranger is going to have to do it and do it right, it's going to cost real money but taking more than a nominal sum out of the benefits will leave some claimants without enough money to live on.
  
• There are temptations for rep payees. Some will give in to the temptation and steal from the person whose money they're supposed to be handling. There's no way to completely prevent this. There's not even a clear path to reducing it. Detecting it after it happens is difficult.
  
• Overseeing rep payees is a difficult job. Even with adequate staffing at Social Security there will always be problems but Social Security lacks the manpower to do a lot of things, including effectively overseeing rep payees. That's because agency appropriations are too low, like, maybe, two billion dollars a year too low. One political party tries hard to keep the Social Security Administration underfunded for reasons that go well beyond rep payees.
  

Am I Spoiling The Soft Rollout?

      A friend just stumbled upon the fact that Social Security's ERE online system for attorneys and others representing claimants now allows access to their clients' files pending at the initial and reconsideration levels. Who know how long this may have been available but no one knew? I guess they were planning to make an announcement eventually.

     Unlike at the hearing and Appeals Council levels, there's no way yet of accessing a list of cases pending at initial and reconsideration but this is still a step forward.

New Dismissal Procedures

      From the Social Security Administration:

... On August 31, 2020, we provided guidance to hearings offices that administrative law judges may resume issuing dismissals for late-filing of a hearing or failure to appear at a hearing.

To ensure hearing offices are appropriately issuing these types of dismissals (late filing or failure to appear at a hearing), hearing offices will now develop the record for good cause by issuing a Request to Show Cause for Late Filing or Failure to Appear notice. 

This added step provides one more opportunity, beyond our COVID-19 emergency procedures, for claimants to provide good cause for failure to meet filing deadlines or to appear at their telephone hearings.  In addition to this added step for late-filing/failure-to-appear dismissals, we have temporarily expanded our traditional in-line quality reviews of hearing dispositions to focus on ensuring that dismissals are policy-compliant.  ...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Former Social Security Employee

      From the History Channel:

... Ruth Bader married Martin David Ginsburg, whom she had met at Cornell, shortly after receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1954. She had her first child, Jane, in 1955. At the time, she worked at a Social Security office in Lawton, Oklahoma, near where her husband, who was in the U.S. Army, had been posted. She had been rated for a GS-5 job, but when she mentioned she was pregnant, she was given a GS-2 job as a typist. It was her first experience with on-the-job discrimination because of her gender. While working in the Social Security office, she also became aware of how hard it was for Native Americans to receive Social Security. Both forms of discrimination stuck with her and helped form the basis of her future career. ...

The RECAP Project

     Thousands of Social Security cases end up being appealed to the federal courts every year. One annoying aspect of practicing in the federal courts is the costs charged for the PACER system. It's the system for online access to court records. With PACER you often have to pay to get access to public records. My gut feeling is that this is wrong.

     Recently, I've discovered a worthy project to try to alleviate the PACER monopoly at least a little and Social Security attorneys can participate:

RECAP Project — Turning PACER Around Since 2009

RECAP is an online archive and free extension for Firefox and Chrome that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.

If you use PACER, install RECAP. Once installed, every docket or PDF you purchase on PACER will be added to the RECAP Archive. Anything somebody else has added to the archive will be available to you for free — right in PACER itself. ...

The Archives and APIs

Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs.

Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. ...

1.3% COLA?

      From CNBC:

... The Senior Citizens League is a nonpartisan advocacy group for older Americans and has a history of accurately forecasting the annual change. The group estimates that the Social Security COLA for 2021 could be about 1.3%.

That is less than the 1.6% adjustment made for 2020 and one of the lowest increases Social Security has ever had. ...