OIG Report On Telephone Service Last Summer

     From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

On July 21, 2020, Representative John Larson, Chair, and Tom Reed, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Social Security, requested the Office of the Inspector General review SSA’s telephone services during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this report, we address SSA’s telephone services for June 2020. ...

In June 2020, SSA’s field offices and national 800-number received30 percent more calls than June 2019, with field offices receiving most of the additional calls. Also, during the same periods, 

• calls to the field offices and the national 800-number during business hours resulted in fewer busy messages, though the business hours for the national 800-number were reduced in June 2020, 
• the number of callers who hung up without speaking to an employee during business hours was lower for the field offices but slightly higher for the national 800-number, 
• the number of calls handled by employees was much higher for calls to the field offices but remained about the same for calls to the national 800-number, and
• callers to field offices waited less time for service while callers to the 800-number waited longer. ...
  

In general, SSA’s telephone services performance during June 2020 was similar to 13 customer service call centers we reviewed from 10 other Federal agencies, as compared to June 2019, but SSA’s performance seemed to fare better during COVID-19 than industry call centers. ...

Three Years In The Slammer For Former SSA Employee

      From a press release:

U.S. District Judge George L. Russell, III sentenced Cheikh Ahmet Tidiane Cisse, age 45, of Baltimore, Maryland, today to three years and a day in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release for theft of government property and aggravated identity theft, in connection with a scheme in which Cisse filed fraudulent claims for Social Security benefits using fictitious identities and the identities of actual individuals, and attempted to collected over $236,000.  Judge Russell also ordered Cisse to pay restitution of $83,247 and forfeit $30,000 seized from Cisse’s home and pay a money judgment in the amount of $51,107. ...

According to his plea agreement, as part of his job, Cisse was responsible for reviewing the identity documents of social security claimants living abroad, such as passports, marriage certificates, and identity cards.  Cisse then created new, fictitious identities in SSA's database, often using information from the foreign identity documents he reviewed, which were issued social security numbers (SSNs).  Cisse used the fictitious identities to file fraudulent claims for social security divorced spouse survivor's benefits against actual deceased individuals, directing the benefits payments to debit cards or bank accounts he opened in the names of the fictitious identities using the identity documents he obtained through his employment.  Cisse sometimes provided his home address for that of the fictitious claimants, but also provided an address in Quebec, Canada, that corresponded to a mail forwarding service to which he subscribed, making it appear as if the fictitious claimants lived abroad.  Through this mail forwarding service, Cisse received mail associated with the scheme, including genuine social security cards in the names of the fictitious identities and benefits payments. ...

Senate Finance Committe Schedules Hearing On Service Delivery

      The full Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing for 10:00 AM on April 29 on Social Security During COVID: How the Pandemic Hampered Access to Benefits and Strategies for Improving Service Delivery. Here's the witness list: 

• Grace Kim, Deputy Commissioner, Operations, Social Security Administration 
• Kascadare Causeya, Program Manager, Central City Concern, Portland , OR 
• Peggy Murphy, Immediate Past President, National Council of Social Security Management Associations, Great Falls , MT 
• Tara Dawson McGuinness, Founder, Senior Advisor, New Practice Lab, New America, Washington, DC

      This hearing is a big sign that there will be considerable pressure on Social Security to reopen its field offices to the public in the next few months. To my friends who work at Social Security, get vaccinated and expect to return to the office before the end of the summer. This weird interval in our lives is drawing to a close, whether we like it or not. Once you're fully vaccinated, you're at virtually no risk from Covid-19. There's no reason to keep public services closed just to protect people who refuse to be vaccinated.

Hire, Hire, Hire

      The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the labor union that represents most Social Security employees recently asked its members for suggestions on improving employee morale, recruitment and retention. Here's an excerpt from their report on what they heard back:

Problems and Suggestions:

Hire, Hire, Hire:

Problem:

The lack of adequate staffing was the most cited complaint from employees.  The second most cited complaint was impossible expectations due to unmanageable workloads – which would also be connected to the lack of adequate staffing.  If we had adequate staffing to distribute the workloads so that everyone would have a manageable workload – the expectations for processing workloads would be fair and stress, anxiety, animosity, depression, etc. would be reduced considerably.  This would also have a major beneficial result on retention (not to mention increased productivity, reducing errors, improving customer service, etc.).

Suggested Solution 1:

Increase the amount of hiring for the front lines.  Stop reducing staffing in order to justify budget allocations for computer programs that we do not need and do not want.  Devote the resources necessary to the front lines where the work is being done – even if this means reducing the number of project managers, admin personal currently dedicated to compiling reports that do not change much from year to year, employees charged with creating training cartoons intended to train employees who are fully grown, etc.  Make budgeting decisions that are smart. ...

OMB Pushing Digital Signatures

      From a Federal News Network piece on information technology modernization:

Take, for example, digital signatures. This technology has been around since the late 1990s, but only in the last year did agencies fully realize its potential. Now the Office of Management and Budget is telling agencies in the budget passback, which Federal News Network obtained, to “accelerate the adoption and utilization of electronic signatures for public facing digital forms to the fullest extent practical in alignment with OMB Memorandum M-19-17 and OMB Memorandum M-00-15.”

Supreme Court Rules Against Issue Exhaustion

     From the syllabus of the just announced Supreme Court opinion in Carr v. Saul:

Held: The Courts of Appeals erred in imposing an issue-exhaustion requirement on petitioners’ Appointments Clause claims. Pp. 4–12.

(a) Administrative review schemes commonly require parties to give the agency an opportunity to address an issue before seeking judicial review of that question. Such administrative issue-exhaustion requirements are typically creatures of statute or regulation. But where as here, no statute or regulation imposes an issue-exhaustion requirement, courts decide whether to require issue exhaustion based on “an analogy to the rule that appellate courts will not consider arguments not raised before trial courts.” Sims v. Apfel, 530 U. S. 103, 109. “[T]he desirability of a court imposing a requirement of issue exhaustion depends on the degree to which the analogy to normal adversarial litigation applies in a particular administrative proceeding.” Ibid. In Sims, which declined to apply an issue-exhaustion requirement to SSA Appeals Council proceedings, the Court explained that “the rationale for requiring issue exhaustion is at its greatest” when “the parties are expected to develop the issues in an adversarial administrative proceeding,” but is “much weaker” when “an administrative proceeding is not adversarial.” Id., at 110. Although Sims dealt with administrative review before the SSA Appeals Council, much of the opinion’s rationale applies equally to SSA ALJ proceedings. Pp. 4–8.

(b) Even assuming that ALJ proceedings are comparatively more adversarial than Appeals Council proceedings, the question remains whether the ALJ proceedings here were adversarial enough to support the “analogy to judicial proceedings” that undergirds judicially created issue-exhaustion requirements. Sims, 530 U. S., at 112 (plurality opinion). Pp. 8–12. 

(1) In the specific context of petitioners’ Appointments Clause challenges, two considerations tip the scales decidedly against imposing an issue-exhaustion requirement. First, agency adjudications are generally ill suited to address structural constitutional challenges,which usually fall outside the adjudicators’ areas of technical expertise. See, e.g., Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Bd., 561 U. S. 477, 491. Second, this Court has consistently recognized a futility exception to exhaustion requirements. See, e.g., Bethesda Hospital Assn. v. Bowen, 485 U. S. 399, 405–406. Both considerations apply fully here: Petitioners assert purely constitutional claims about which SSA ALJs have no special expertise and for which they can provide no relief. United States v. L. A. Tucker Truck Lines, Inc., 344 U. S. 33, distinguished. Pp. 9–11.

(2) The Commissioner’s contention that petitioners cannot obtain new hearings because they did not “timely challenge” their adjudicators’ appointments presumes what the Commissioner has failed to prove: that petitioners’ challenges are, in fact, untimely. The Commissioner’s reliance on Ryder v. United States, 515 U. S. 177, and Lucia, 585 U. S. ___, is misplaced, as neither decision had occasion to opine on what would constitute a “timely” objection in an administrative re-view scheme like the SSA’s. Pp. 11–12.

Voters Support SSI Reform

      From a report by Data for Progress (click on images to view full size):

The Costs Of Extending SSI To U.S. Territories

      I was looking for something else but happened upon an estimate that Social Security's Office of Chief Actuary made last year of the costs of extending SSI to all U.S. territories. The cost would be $23.4 billion over a ten year period with the vast majority of that for Puerto Rico. There's no projection presented of the number of claimants who would become eligible for benefits.

     The issue of whether it is constitutional to deny SSI benefits to U.S. citizens who reside in U.S. territories will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall. It is also possible that President Biden will formally propose this as a change in the statutes.