Silly Fibs Happen When SSA Employees Are Stretched Past Their Limits

      I seem to be hearing an increase in silly fibs from Social Security employees designed to terminate telephone calls without the Social Security employee having to actually do something about a problem. Example: We called to ask about a missing SSI attorney fee payment and were told "You've already been paid. What you thought was just your Title II attorney fee payment was actually a payment for both the SSI and Title II attorney fees."  No, it doesn't work like that. Title II and SSI payments are never mixed. Field office employees know this as well as I do. Yes, the windfall offset can wipe out an SSI attorney fee but it would have been simple to have told us that but that's not what we were told and there's certainly been no notice to that effect or we wouldn't have been calling in the first place.

     My point here isn't that Social Security employees are liars. No, they're generally truthful and helpful but things are just a mess at Social Security now. There are huge backlogs everywhere. Field office and payment center employees are overwhelmed. Stretch good employees past their limits and things happen that shouldn't happen. Social Security's grossly inadequate operating budget is the problem here.

Grim Numbers

      From David Weaver writing for The Hill:

Last week, for the first time, the Social Security Administration (SSA) released information on the number of beneficiaries who died in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic began. There were nearly 400,000 more beneficiary deaths in 2020 than the agency tabulated for 2019, representing a 17 percent year-over-year increase. ...

SSA’s statistics almost certainly reflect the concentration of COVID-19 deaths among the populations the agency serves. The CDC's death data, which includes all individuals and not just Social Security beneficiaries, indicates about 500,000 more deaths occurred in the United States in 2020 than in 2019. The CDC estimates that approximately 375,000 deaths in 2020 were due to COVID-19. ...

Republicans Raise Questions About Andrew Saul's Firing And About Acting Commissioner

      Three Republican Senators and two Republican members of the House of Representatives have written the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to raise questions about the legality of the firing of Andrew Saul as Commissioner of Social Security and about Kilolo Kijakazi's tenure as Acting Commissioner. 

     I predict their effort is going nowhere. If the GOP really thought it had a case, it would be suing, not messing with GAO. The questions about Kijakazi are fairly ridiculous. They imply darkly that Kijakazi hadn't served long enough with Social Security to have been eligible to become Acting Commissioner. Leaving aside the question of whether the Vacancies Reform Act even applies in this situation since the Social Security Act itself says specifically that the President can designate anyone to be Acting Commissioner, Kijakazi started work at Social Security in January, 2021, in plenty of time to have been there 90 days, as required by the Vacancies Reform Act, before Saul was fired.

Getting A Bit Vicious

      From a blog post by the Revolving Door Project, which is sponsored by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank:

HuffPost reported last week that the Biden administration is considering a few unusual names for the long-delayed nomination of Administrator of the Social Security Administration. On one hand, there’s Nancy Altman, the President of Social Security Works who has fought for the economic security of seniors and Social Security recipients for years. She has written three books on the history and economics of Social Security, and currently serves on the Social Security Advisory Board, which provides oversight of the program. In other words, she is eminently qualified for the job.

On the other hand are two well-connected political insiders, both of whom Revolving Door Project has a history with: Seth Harris and Donna Shalala.

Harris is the former Acting Labor Secretary under Obama who later turned to shadow lobbying and legal work for union-busting BigLaw firms. As I wrote for the American Prospect last October, Harris is one of the intellectual architects of Prop 22, the California law which protects companies like Uber and Lyft from having to recognize their workers as full employees entitled to the minimum wage and benefits. That’s actually a Social Security issue, too: now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland championed a bill in 2019 to require gig economy companies to pay their workers’ Social Security and Medicare taxes, since firms don’t have to pay those taxes for independent contractors (which is how gig economy firms misclassify their workers.)

Harris’ work has rarely touched on Social Security directly, but in his own words, he believes the old retirement formula of Social Security and pensions “is largely gone,” and at least part of the solution involves simply having people work longer. As he said at a Brookings Institution panel in 2019, “we should be encouraging some people to work more unless we are going to really dramatically transform the system that we have. We have transformed it. But let me also say, we’ve transformed it to favor more work, not to favor less work.”

In 2020, notably, Harris was a founding member of a research program funded by the private annuities industry. He also wrote personal finance columns for an annuity company’s website.

For her part, Shalala was a first-term Representative from Florida when the Revolving Door Project helped expose that she hadn’t filed ethics paperwork regarding her personal stock holdings, just as she was appointed to a board overseeing CARES Act funding. That funding could have benefited firms in which Shalala was invested. She ultimately, predictably, lost reelection.

What makes an unremarkable one-time Congresswoman qualified to lead one of the largest and most popular benefit programs in the federal government? Shalala’s backers point to her eight years as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. But that’s an inauspicious credential for the would-be head of a benefits program: Clinton infamously campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” a crusade against the poor and misfortuned which utterly failed to do anything but make the government less caring to the most vulnerable, as Bryce Covert documented at the New Republic.

Shalala’s HHS work touched Social Security most directly when she appointed the 1994 Advisory Council on Social Security. The Advisory Council originally was the body which provided oversight of Social Security, but was later replaced by today’s Social Security Advisory Board. The bipartisan board Shalala picked ultimately came back with three different recommendations for making Social Security less generous, in the name of balancing budgets. The proposals included taxing some benefits; investing Social Security in stocks and equities; and gradually moving the system over to a set of individual investment accounts, similar to switching out a pension for a 401(k). None of these proposals were ultimately adopted. ...

     At least I'm glad there are people who care who becomes the Commissioner of Social Security. There's always great interest in the programs Social Security administers but usually great apathy about the agency itself.

No Longer Even Tracking 800 Number Service?

     In the past, Social Security collected data on how well it was able to answer its 800 telephone number, calculating an agent busy rate -- the percentage of callers who receive a busy signal. That percentage for fiscal year 2019 was 14.1%. However, it appears from their recently posted numbers that they're either answering almost all of their calls or their system for tracking busy signals has broken down almost completely. I suppose it's also possible that their system is now set to keep ringing for a set number of minutes before just cutting off the caller and they're pretending that's not a busy signal. In any case, I'm pretty sure the recent numbers they've posted bear no reasonable relationship to caller experience. For the sake of completeness they post their 800 number speed to answer numbers as well but you can easily make those numbers look better just by hanging up on people more quickly.

     The published numbers on field office telephone service aren't so obviously fishy but they also seem way off from what I and my clients have been experiencing.

Some COLA History

Click on image to view full size

 

From the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

Good Job!

     From the Twitter feed of Social Security's Office of Inspector General:

Social Security OIG

@TheSSAOIG

·

Holly (left, pictured with our agent) noticed a customer trying to buy gift cards and asked a few questions. Holly saved the customer from being scammed out of thousands of dollars. Thank you Holly! #SlamtheScam #SocialSecurity #HollySlammedtheScam #GiftCardsAreForGifts

Relief For Some Disabled People With Student Loans

      From National Public Radio:

The U.S. Education Department announced Thursday that it is discharging the outstanding student loans of more than 323,000 borrowers who have significant, permanent disabilities, and will remove barriers for borrowers who qualify for this relief in the future. The announcement will erase some $5.8 billion in debt and marks a significant step toward fixing a troubled debt relief program meant to help borrowers with disabilities. ...

Now, relief will become automatic for those who are identified through a data match with the Social Security Administration. The next match is in September, and based on those who were identified in June, the department expects more than 323,000 people to receive relief amounting to $5.8 billion. ...

     This won't be for all recipients of Social Security disability benefits -- just those assigned to the MINE (Medical Improvement Not Expected) category. Those who are not in the MINE category may still get relief they must apply and it's not automatic.