Delusional Letter From Andrew Saul

      From Letter to the Public on Service by Andrew Saul:

I want to update you about how things are going at the Social Security Administration. ...

We are currently testing drop box and express appointment options for the public to bring in documentation. ...

[I]f you do need to replace your card, we are testing video appointments if you need a new Social Security card but do not need to change any of the information in our records. Although ideas like these began as solutions during COVID-19, we are considering how they could improve service in the future. Some of these concepts also allow us to consider how we might continue to use telework, something that most organizations and companies have depended on during the COVID-19 pandemic, to drive longer-term operational efficiencies like reducing space. We could use those savings to provide you more online service options and hire more people to serve you more quickly as well as to retain outstanding employees. We will continue to engage our managers, employees, and unions on ways we could use telework to improve customer service and other issues. ...

As we contemplate the future, we are delivering now. To help improve deteriorating service, we have added over 6,000 frontline employees to help you. We decreased the average wait to talk to our 800 Number agents by one-third and reduced the agent busy rate by over 50 percent in the last two years, and our 800 Number agents handled 1.6 million more calls than they did a year ago.

During the pandemic, we shifted service to the telephone where local office employees answered 13 million more calls last year than they did in fiscal (FY) 2019. They answered your calls in under 3 minutes on average compared to an average wait of nearly 24 minutes in FY 2019. ...

The pandemic has significantly disrupted parts of our disability process, particularly at the state Disability Determination Services (DDS) that make disability determinations for us. We have provided the DDSs with additional hiring and overtime to help address a significant increase in pending initial disability cases. The DDSs have been able to reduce the number of people waiting for a decision on initial disability claims by about 100,000 cases since the height of the pending cases in August 2020. In order to make initial disability decisions as quickly as possible, and to reduce the burden on the medical community still stressed from the pandemic, we have focused our limited resources on completing initial requests for disability benefits and have reduced the number of continuing disability reviews we are conducting. ...

     I don't know how to describe this letter as anything other than delusional. This letter talks as if service has actually improved instead of deteriorating during Covid-19! I'm out here dealing with the agency and I can tell you emphatically that isn't true. Dealing with the agency has become more and more difficult. Backlogs are soaring on disability claims at the initial and reconsideration levels. This letter cherry picks a few stats that have improved during Covid-19 while ignoring the mass of other stats that would show declining service. The thing that gets me most is the claim to have hired over 6,000 frontline employees. Could Social Security have hired 6,000 employees in the last year? Sure, but they were mostly replacing existing workers who were leaving. There's been little net increase in the agency's workforce. In March 2020, Social Security had 60,659 employees. In December 2020, the agency had 61,816 employees. That's an increase of 1,157 employees, not 6,000, nothing more than a wobble in the numbers. No, I don't think they've hired 5,000 new employees since the end of last year. The idea that Social Security could increase its workforce by about 10% while its operating budget in real dollars has gone down is bonkers.

Hope For Covid Long Haulers?

     From the Washington Post:

Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain.

But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned.

“I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was possible when I was really sick.”

Some people who have spent months suffering from long-haul covid-19 are taking to social media to report their delight at seeing their symptoms disappear after their vaccinations, leaving experts chasing yet another puzzling clinical development surrounding the disease caused by the coronavirus. ...

U.S. clinicians and researchers have yet to come to a consensus on even a definition for long-haul covid-19. They do not know how many people have it, what all the symptoms may be or who tends to develop problems that persist or begin after the virus is cleared.

 A December workshop held by the National Institutes of Health that began grappling with those issues suggested that 10 percent to 30 percent of people infected with the coronavirus suffer some long-term symptoms. And on Feb. 23, NIH announced that it would spend more than $1.1 billion over four years to study the effects of long-term covid-19. ...

But there is little guidance about vaccination for people suffering through extended battles with the disease, other than medical authorities’ instruction that everyone in the United States should be immunized. Diana Berrent, founder of Survivor Corps, an online organization of people with long-term covid-19 symptoms, said many members of the group were initially hesitant to comply for fear that the vaccine would create more havoc with their immune systems.

One tiny study released Monday but not yet submitted for peer review concluded that people with long-term symptoms who get vaccinated are more likely to see their problems resolve or not worsen than people who have not been vaccinated. But the research out of the University of Bristol in England compared only 44 vaccinated patients against 22 unvaccinated ones and was designed to determine whether the vaccines were safe for people with long-haul covid-19. ...

When Survivor Corps informally surveyed its members recently, 216 people said they felt no different after vaccination, 171 said their conditions improved and 63 reported that they felt worse, Berrent said. ...

Unions Complain Social Security Dragging Its Feet On Implementing Biden Administration Directive To Re-Negotiate Contracts

      From Government Executive:

Nearly two months after President Biden rescinded a series of Trump administration anti-union directives and instructed federal agencies to bargain with labor groups over a much wider scope of issues, union officials said the leadership of the Social Security Administration still isn’t doing enough to comply with the new administration’s plans for labor-management relations.

On Biden’s third day in office, he signed an executive order that rescinded the Trump administration’s federal workforce policies and ordered agencies to engage in so-called “permissive bargaining,” a term that refers to a wide array of workplace issues that traditionally can be subject to negotiation only at the discretion of an agency head. But in the days and weeks that followed, many agencies failed to turn over a new leaf in the labor-management arena, saying they required additional guidance from their legal teams and the Office of Personnel Management.

On March 5, Acting OPM Director Kathleen McGettigan issued that guidance, and the message to agencies was clear: If you have implemented a union contract enforcing elements of President Trump’s workforce policies, you must reopen the agreement and negotiate with the union.

“In carrying out this task, agencies should take a hard look at the degree to which, if any, [the executive orders] influenced bargaining-table strategy and decision-making,” McGettigan wrote. “[Biden’s order] neither requires nor prohibits affected agencies from reopening CBAs on other matters not related to subjects covered by [the Trump orders].”

But in the intervening days, union officials at the Social Security Administration said that leadership at the agency have done the bare minimum to move toward compliance with the new order. ...

In a statement, agency spokesman Mark Hinkle said Social Security has begun a review of all of its union contracts and has asked for unions' "input," which it expects to complete by April 23. He said the agency is moving "enthusiastically" and at a "reasonable speed" to implement Biden's workforce order. ...

On Monday, officials at Social Security sent a copy of the agency’s new COVID-19 workforce safety plan to union officials just two hours before publishing it for the entire workforce. Negotiations regarding the policy would only be allowed “post-implementation.” The executive order mandating the safety plan requires agencies to “promptly consult” federal employee unions on the plan’s implementation. ...

[American Federation of Government Employees Council 220 President Ralph ] DeJuliis said that in the end, the agency’s recalcitrance was unsurprising.

“My first local president when I joined the agency in 1979 laughed and told me, ‘There are two ways of doing things: the right way, and the SSA way,’” he said. “Forty years later, and there are still two ways of doing things: the right way, and the SSA way. SSA relishes in doing it the wrong way, and then it tries to make the victim the person who is at fault. Any time I talk to any attorney on federal sector cases, they say the worst agency to deal with is SSA.”

Question For The Day

      Once field offices reopen, should vaccination for Covid-19 be required of Social Security employees who have extensive dealings with the public?

     On the one hand, we generally respect personal autonomy when it comes to healthcare decisions. On the other hand, while even vaccinated employees pose some risk of spreading Covid-19 to the public and ever though the evidence isn't yet definitive, it seems clear  that un-vaccinated field office employees will pose a much greater risk to the public.

     I've got zero sympathy for vaccine skeptics. Even though I've got relatives, friends and neighbors in this camp, I regard them as dangerously deluded fools. I have no problem with putting pressure on them. That's what it's going to take for us to fully get past this pandemic.

Covid-19 And Federal Workers Compensation

      I don't know whether there have already been cases of Covid-19 associated with employment at Social Security. If not, there may be before this is over. The Department of Labor has issued some guidelines for federal workers compensation cases alleging Covid-19 as an occupational disease.

     By the way, I once had a client who got workers compensation benefits for a really bad case of tuberculosis that was affecting parts of his body well beyond his lungs. There was no dispute about it being a compensable occupational disease. He had been a monkey handler working for an enterprise doing medical research. It turns out that tuberculosis is endemic among monkeys used in research and that getting tuberculosis is a well known risk of handling those monkeys. The things you learn in this line of work.

Puerto Rico Case Won't Be Heard By SCOTUS Until The Fall

      The Supreme Court has issued what should be its final oral argument schedule for this term of Court and it doesn't include U.S. v. Vaello-Madero, the case on the constitutionality of denying SSI to U.S. citizens residing in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. That means the case should be argued early in the October term of the Supreme Court, which always begins on the first Monday in October. An opinion might come in early 2022.

     This delay would also give the Biden Administration time to settle the case if it wishes. I doubt they will but it's not out of the question. We still don't have a Solicitor General, the official responsible for handling cases at the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government.

EM On E-Signatures

     From Emergency Message  EM 20022 REV 2 issued yesterday:

... While this EM is in effect, use the instructions below if any of the forms are submitted without a signature the agency would otherwise recognize as valid, so long as such forms are accompanied by an electronically signed SSA-1696:

· SSA-1693 Fee Agreement for Representation before SSA (or other written fee agreement)
· SSA-16 Application for Disability Insurance Benefits
· SSA-8001 Application for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) (Deferred or Abbreviated)
· SSA-8000 Application for Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
· SSA-L2 Comprehensive Notice and Application Summary for Third Party Filed iClaim
· SSA-820 Work Activity Report – Self-Employment
· SSA-821 Work Activity Report - Employee
· SSA-827 Authorization To Disclose Information To The Social Security Administration
· SSA-455 Disability Update Report

If a representative submits any of the above forms along with an electronically signed SSA-1696, technicians should, in one single telephone contact with the claimant, ensure that he or she take all steps for each form submitted. ...

e1696?

      From a notice that Social Security posted online but has not promoted:

New online service - Electronic filing of a representative's notice of appointment  On February 22, we released a new service to allow representatives to initiate an SSA-1696 notice of appointment online where they and their claimants can complete, sign and submit the form electronically with no personal contact. This is a two-step process the representative must initiate. Once the claimant completes the second step and submits the signed document, the service will automatically route the document for processing. This service will help expedite the appointment process and give representatives and claimants flexibility. We will continue to accept submissions of appointment notices via mail, eFax, or uploaded through our filing portals and Electronic Records Express as before. The link to the e1696 is located at the top left of this page, so be sure to bookmark it!

     And this is the link to the e1696. I haven't tried it yet but I'm told it's not working, which may be why they're not promoting it.

 

     Update: Social Security just posted this today:

How will SSA process my notice of appointment while emergency procedures are in place?

Date: March 11, 2021

Beginning March 11, 2021, we have revised our temporary procedures to allow you to use different methods to sign the notice of appointment of a representative and fee agreement, if the fee agreement is submitted with the new notice of appointment, during the current COVID-19 health emergency. During this time, if we receive an appointment document such as the Form SSA-1696, on its own or along with an SSA-8000, SSA-8001, SSA-L2, SSA-820, SSA-821, SSA-827, or SSA-455 form, and your signature appears to be an electronic or digital signature, we will make three attempts to contact you to verify your identity and confirm the signature. If we verify your identity and signature, we will process the appointment as usual. If the first attempt to reach you by telephone is unsuccessful, we also will send a call-in letter to you and the representative you requested. If we cannot reach you and you do not return our call, or do not verify the signature, we will return the paperwork to the person who submitted it without recognizing the appointment.

We also have temporary procedures in place permitting you to verbally appoint a representative during a “remote” telephone hearing with an administrative law judge, if you submit a written notice of appointment afterwards. In this case, we will accept an electronic signature on the written appointment notice, without needing to call you again.