Almost A Caricature Of Republican Priorities

      A press release:

The Inspector General for the Social Security Administration, Gail S. Ennis, announces the addition of four new investigative units to the Cooperative Disability Investigations (CDI) program. CDI is a nationwide joint effort between the Social Security Administration and its Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to fight disability fraud and save money for taxpayers. The four investigative units recently opened offices in Omaha, Nebraska; Las Vegas, Nevada; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. ...

     Just how much fraud are you expecting to find in New Hampshire and Wyoming? Do they really need their own dedicated offices? And why are you saying this is directed at "disability fraud"? I think that most fraud cases detected at Social Security involve retirement benefits.

     Social Security is closing down field offices which provide service to the public while opening new offices to hunt for fraud even in low population areas. What does that tell us about the priorities contained in Social Security's operating budget?

Requirement To Submit Medical Records Electronically To Go Into Effect Next Month

      The Social Security Administration has posted a notice in the Federal Register that the requirement to submit medical records electronically officially goes into effect on November 4.

A Real Charmer

 

    A Texas man has pleaded guilty to communicating threats after saying he would kill “every black person at the Social Security office” if he didn’t get his benefits. And that’s not all he said. Not by a long shot! 

Four Years For $700,000 Identify Theft

 

    From the Daily Herald of Chicago:

A 42-year-old woman who used to work in the Social Security Administration's Aurora office was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing more than $700,000 in fake benefits.

Federal prosecutors said Anne Aroste, 42, of Montgomery, worked in the federal agency's Aurora field office between 2013 and 2018 and pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

She admitted that she used the identities of dead workers to create new applications for Social Security benefits and used her credentials to approve the applications and funnel the benefits to bank accounts she controlled. ... 

Allsup Got Almost $4.5 Million In Ticket To Work Money In 2019

      Social Security has made a proactive disclosure of recipients of money under the Ticket To Work (TTW) program, which pays for rehabilitation to enables Social Security disability recipients to return to work. A rehabilitation provider gets paid based upon claimants returning to work. 

     Ranked in third place on the list of largest recipients of TTW money in 2019, at $4,467,810, is Allsup Employment Services, LLC. Yep, that's part of the Allsup non-attorney group that represents Social Security disability claimants before the agency.

     Doing this actually occurred to me years ago. Sometimes you help a claimant get on benefits but you know from their medical records that they're getting better and have a realistic chance of returning to work. It doesn't happen much but it does happen. Since you already have their medical records, you're in a great place to spot these cases and to profit from providing "rehabilitation" to people who need little help anyway. I never did it because it seemed like a conflict of interest or at least it didn't seem to smell quite right. It's not illegal, though, as far as I know. Of course, I don’t know how Allsup is coming by its TTW cases.

     I wonder if there are other affiliates of entities representing Social Security claimants on the TTW list, perhaps with names that can't be so easily connected.

More On The New 1696

Memo

     To: Social Security:

     From: Charles T. Hall

     Would you please quit encrypting the damned SSA-1696! You don't need to do it. To simplify matters, attorneys representing claimants typically combine the forms to be signed by new clients into one PDF. We want to make it so that we only have to enter the claimant's name, address, telephone number and Social Security number once and the data propagates to all the documents in the PDF. When you encrypt the SSA-1696, we have no choice but to print out the 1696, scan it and then laboriously re-enter the fields so they'll line up with the fields in the rest of the packet of forms. This is pointless and should be unnecessary. The encryption serves no legitimate purpose. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, just forward this to the people who design forms for you. I assure you that they'll understand what I'm talking about.

     Thank you!

New 1696

      The Social Security Administration has issued a new version of the SSA-1696 form used to appoint an attorney or other representative. I wish they'd give us some advance notice before they do this.

Would Amy Coney Barrett's Confirmation Endanger Social Security?

      From Kim Phillips-Fein writing for the New York Times:

Much of the public anxiety about Amy Coney Barrett — judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Notre Dame law professor and Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — has focused on the question of abortion, and whether as a believer in originalism and a practicing Catholic she would be likely to vote to reverse Roe v. Wade.

At least as consequential might be her position on the Social Security Administration: She has suggested that an originalist — whose view of the law is rooted in the idea that the duty of judges is to ascertain whether laws reflect the original meaning of the Constitution — might say that it is not clearly permissible given a strict reading of the Constitution. This isn’t to say that she thinks it should or even could be repealed. “Some decisions,” she wrote, “thought inconsistent with the Constitution’s original public meaning are so well baked into government that reversing them would wreak havoc.” But it does indicate that in the area of judicial philosophy, there are many ways to be extreme. ...

Those who share Judge Barrett’s belief in the legal philosophy of originalism are not ideologically monolithic, but most originalist judges are united in a deep skepticism toward the idea of a powerful federal government....

During the 1930s, similar issues brought Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration into conflict with the Supreme Court. Many of the early initiatives of the New Deal were rejected as unconstitutional  ...

After his re-election in 1936, with the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act facing constitutional review and the country mired in economic depression, Roosevelt did not want to see his entire program jeopardized by the court. Instead, in February 1937 he proposed a mandatory retirement age of 70 — the “court-packing” plan, as it became known — with any judge who refused to step down to be supplemented by an additional justice with full voting rights. ...

Will the Supreme Court become once more what it was in the early 20th century? Will it insist on a circumscribed national government and a rigid vision of individual economic rights — in the midst of a second Gilded Age?...

     Phillips-Fein isn't the only one thinking that even Social Security could be at risk. Laurence Tribe is saying the same thing. 

     Do not underestimate the extent to which the right wing still wants to re-litigate the New Deal or how radical the Supreme Court will be with Coney Barrett on the bench.

     I think that what worries me the most about Coney Barrett is that she has virtually no experience practicing law. She went from law school to a Supreme Court clerkship to a short time drafting Supreme Court briefs for a law firm to being a law school prof to the Court of Appeals. I don’t think that background should qualify anyone for the Supreme Court. If she had been nominated to a District Court judgeship would she have been considered qualified? Not in my opinion. In fact, I think she would have had enough sense to decline such a nomination.