Union Leader Seems To Be Expecting New Commissioner Soon

      From a piece for Federal News Network by Ralph de Juliis, President of the union that represents most Social Security employees:

... As representatives of 26,000 employees in field offices, workload support units, and teleservice centers, we are ready for a new day of leadership at the Social Security Administration. The appointment of the next Social Security Administration Commissioner will not only set the tone for the next four years of workplace management at SSA, but have lasting implications for the millions of Americans who rely on the services we provide.    

 First, the next commissioner must fundamentally respect the dignity of work: that all labor has value, and all SSA employees are worthy of respect from their peers in management. ...

 Finally, the next commissioner must commit to open and honest dialogue with the union to ensure that our concerns are heard and respected. ...

At SSA under Andrew Saul and Deputy Commissioner David Black, the rot runs deep. It’s time we finally see the commitment to agency-employee relations that has been sorely missed.

     In theory Saul could try to hang on but the recent Supreme Court decision in Seila Law would make that problematic, especially if the new Attorney General or Solicitor General announces that it is the new Administration's position that Seila Law applies to the Social Security Commissioner position. Anybody want to dust off the old writ of quo warranto? If Saul does try to hang on, I expect the union and the new Administration will use him as a piñata.

     David Black, by the way, is no problem. The Social Security Act provides that the Deputy Commissioner becomes the Acting Commissioner but that the President can order that someone else become Acting Commissioner. I would certainly expect that Biden would so order.

I Guess They Gave SSA Free Copies

      Social Security funds research aimed at encouraging disability benefits recipients return to work. The Journal of Rehabilitation has published what appears to be an entire issue showing the results of some of this Social Security funded research. Here are the titles:

• Who’s at risk of entering Social Security Disability Insurance? A comparison of application and allowance rates for groups of at-risk individuals 
• Phase I development of the SGA Model: Use of administrative data and expert opinion to identify key components of the SGA Model  
• Phase II of the SGA Project: Development of the coordinated team approach intervention  
• Implementation and impacts of the Substantial Gainful Activity Project demonstration in Minnesota  
• Launching and supporting the SGA Project in Kentucky and Minnesota: Experiences and perspectives of the Senior Technical Assistance Team 
• Implementation and impacts of the Substantial Gainful Activity Project demonstration in Kentucky  
• Vocational rehabilitation on the road to Social Security Disability  
• “It makes me feel part of the society”: Return-to-work decisions of SSDI beneficiaries 
  

      You can read abstracts of each of these online. However, if you want to read the whole thing though, it's going to cost you 27.50 Euros or about $32.61. I'm not sure if that is per article or whether it gets you the whole issue because I didn't payup.

     Is it appropriate for research funded by the federal government to be behind a pay wall?

Class Actions On HITECH Violations? Sounds Good To Me

     From a blog post on JD Supra:

In the wake of the 2019 United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights (“OCR”) enforcement actions against Bayfront Health St. Petersburg (“Bayfront”) and Korunda Medical, LLC (“Korunda”) pursuant the HIPAA and HITECH Right of Access Initiative—for violations of the rights of patients to obtain access to their medical records promptly, without being overcharged, and in the readily producible format of their choice—private lawsuits have been on the rise to enforce patients’ right to access.

Of most recent note, the matter Russell v. Healthalliance Hospital Broadway Campus, and Ciox Health, LLC, 1:20-cv-01204 (USDC No. Dist. of NY), seeks not only monetary damages for failing to grant access to the medical records of the deceased husband of the Plaintiff, but also certification of a class action on behalf of those similarly situated. ...

Given the fact that 42 U.S.C. § 1320d-5 provides for penalties of $50,000 per violation and up to $1,500,000 in fines per calendar year, the prospect of class actions under this law are to be taken very seriously. ...

     If you work at Social Security, you may wonder why I post this. If you represent claimants, you know all too well. Almost all larger medical providers and some who aren't all so large have entered into contracts with outside companies, such as Ciox, to handle medical records requests for them. It's obvious that these companies, if not the medical providers, regard responding to medical records requests as an opportunity to gouge the requesters. It's a monopoly situation. If my client was treated at a particular hospital or medical practice, there's only one place I can go to get those medical records. There are supposed to be limits on this, provided by HITECH and state laws but these companies try to evade the limits with ever more inventive explanations for why they're allowed to charge more than the law allows. They know in the end we need the records now and we'll have to pay up. We file complaints with the OCR but those take time and the medical records companies involved are almost never punished for their outrageous behavior. The situation has devolved into almost hand to hand combat. Class actions sound like a good idea to me.

A Surprising Blog Post From The "Vampire Squid" Guy

      Matt Taibbi, who is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, has posted on his blog about Social Security. In the first part, he talks about Social Security's performance evaluation system of all things. By the way, my experience is that all performance evaluation systems are a mess. There's no good way of doing it. Taibbi segues into a discussion of Social Security's disability claim adjudication process. Taibbi seems to have conflated the jobs done by different categories of employees in ways which make the system seem even more odd than it actually is.

     Taibbi, by the way, famously described Goldman Sachs as a "vampire squid." Goldman Sachs will have to live with that one for a long, long time.

Phone Scam Indictment

     From a press release:

A first-of-its-kind indictment was unsealed today against Indian-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider, E Sampark, and its Director, Gaurav Gupta, who pushed out tens of millions of scam calls to American consumers on behalf of India-based phone scammers.  Pursuant to a consent permanent injunction, a federal court has also ordered a Florida-based server farm to stop providing E Sampark and Gupta with servers used to help perpetuate the fraud scheme. The consent permanent injunction seeks to prevent E Sampark and Gupta from further victimizing U.S. consumers through the use of the servers located in Florida. ...

As part of a Social Security scam, India-based callers posed as federal agents in order to mislead victims into believing their Social Security number was involved in crimes.  Callers threatened arrest and the loss of the victims’ assets if the victims did not send money.  The callers directed victims to send cash to aliases used by other members of the fraud network, and to transfer funds via gift cards to the callers.  In one instance in November 2019, the callers kept a Marietta, Georgia woman on the phone for over eleven hours while they convinced her that her Social Security number had been compromised, that there was a warrant for her arrest in Texas, and that she should tell no one about the purported investigation.  The callers told the victim that her assets were going to be frozen and that she should purchase gift cards in order to protect her money.  Per the callers’ directions, the victim went around Cobb County to purchase over $35,000 in gift cards, including Target, GameStop, Sephora, and Nordstrom gift cards.  The callers had the victim provide them with the numbers on the back of the cards, which allowed them to steal the funds from her.  E Sampark and Gupta allegedly connected the victim with the fraudsters. ...

And It's All Very Legal But Is It Reasonable Or Fair?

      From Laurence Kotlikoff's column in Forbes:

Imagine you are 25, haven’t seen your now deceased father since you were a young child, never received a penny from him, and find, in your mail, a demand from Social Security to repay over $4,500 that was supposedly overpaid to him on your behalf. This ... is exactly what happened and is happening to Felicia — a hardworking, single mom, who is struggling to get a college degree on a part-time basis. ...

This is the third story I’ve heard of Social Security reaching back decades to correct overpayments nominally paid to minors — minors who had no knowledge whatsoever of this fact nor any ability to determine that Social Security was sending the wrong amount.

Hopefully, someone at Social Security will read this column and put a stop to the System’s hounding of Felicia and others like her. ...

Andrew Saul Claims A "Basically Seamless" Transition To Service Delivery With Field Offices Closed

      Next Avenue has decided to give Andrew Saul, who may be Social Security's Commissioner, its 2020 Influencers in Aging Award. (I'm not joking. There is a legitimate controversy about Saul's position.) According to Wikipedia,"Next Avenue is a digital platform launched by PBS that offers original and aggregated journalism aimed at baby boomers."

     Here's some excerpts from an interview that Saul gave to Next Avenue:

...  "To be honest, a year ago, I never thought we would be this far along now," Saul told me. "It did take us time to get up and running, but now we're going to reap the rewards of a year's planning." ...

... How has customer service improved since you've been on the job would you say?

Well, first we have to talk about, unfortunately, COVID-19, because there's no question you cannot.

When I took over here, we had a tremendous amount of plans to digitalize and modernize the way we deliver services. But obviously when March hit and we were faced with this situation, we had to keep the lights on. We had to protect our employees and our beneficiaries, and therefore we had to revert to operating from home.

And we were forced to close our offices, both our field offices and our disability hearing offices, and become a virtual operation. We had no choice.

So, the service that we were delivering was interrupted, but considering what happened, this team did an amazing job. And I think if you talk to people that use our services on an active basis, they'll say we really made a transformation here which was basically seamless.

Look, I'm not saying everything was perfect. It still isn't perfect. The last six months have really pressed the team to the limits. But having said that, I think we've done a great job in keeping the lights on and keeping the old boiler running.

Now what this [COVID-19] has taught us and what we've been doing is changing the way we do business. And I think it's going to be changed forever. ...

And the field offices?

When we hopefully go back and roll out our field office operations again, we're going to be using many more personal appointments rather than having people just come into the office. I believe the offices are going to be much better organized, with express service for certain things that people come in for on a much more regular basis.

What about the Social Security Administration's website?

We're going to have a new website, completely redesigned, which is something that is important because it's our most important face to our customer.

How far along did you get before you had to pivot in March with the pandemic?

We had most of this underway. And you know, the amazing thing about systems work is you can do it offsite.

I'm not going to tell you this [COVID-19] didn't slow us down, because we had to be able to go from an in-office to a virtual operation. Did it slow us down? Yes, it did slow us down, but now we're running well.

Before the offices were shut down for the pandemic, a lot of people would come into the offices to ask questions and sign up for retirement benefits. How much has closing the field offices slowed down the number of applications that have come in?

You know, it is somewhat slower. What's happened is we have many more eight-hundred number calls. We also have many more calls to the individual offices.

The other thing is: We are getting tremendous amount of hits on our website. I think it's up fifty, sixty percent. We've been getting almost a million hits a day. Wow.

And we are doing about fifty-three percent of our transactions online through those that have the my Social Security account. ...

What else would you like to do to improve customer service?

We're going to have to see what happens when we start reopening the offices to the public.

I don't know how much you knew about the offices before, but it was terrible. I used to go visit these offices and some of the busy ones were really a disaster, in my opinion — just people sitting around waiting. I don't want that anymore. We can't have that.

It doesn't mean that we're not going to have field offices. It doesn't mean that we're not going to have an eight-hundred [toll-free] number. But we are going as quickly as we can so that our major form of communication to our customer is digital and video. ...

Sounds Like They Want To Reduce Unnecessary Secretiveness

     From Emergency Message EM-20054:

A. Purpose
This emergency message (EM) announces an upcoming change in the business process for all instructions designated as sensitive at the time of the publication request.

B. Background
On October 1, 2020, agency stakeholders met to discuss how we apply the sensitive designation to policy instructions. Following the discussion, we developed a draft proposal to improve the application of the sensitive policy designation.

C. Proposal

For each publication, an AC signoff sheet is already required. To ensure the sensitive designation is appropriate, we will be modifying the AC-Level Signoff Document to require a more stringent review and added justification for applying the designation. 

      And here's the signoff sheet:

Section A – This signoff is for:

   A Sensitive Instruction (these instructions are for internal SSA use only – if being designated as a sensitive instruction, what criteria does it meet? please check appropriate box below, highlight that specific section in your attachment and complete the ‘Background’ section below following this determination)

☐  Descriptions of internal security controls and override instructions in claims processes

☐ Instructions which explain to employees what steps they must take to effectuate or redirect a payment or to override an internal control feature; or

☐ Instructions designed to detect fraudulent documents and actions

 

Background/Justification: