GAO Report On Telework Security

      The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on telework security at several agencies, including Social Security. The report is short on specifics, probably to avoid pointing out areas to attack, but Social Security comes in for mild criticism. I can’t tell whether it’s quibbles over the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s or whether there have been substantive dangers.

65 Months For Former Social Security Employee

     From a press release:

A Saint Pauls, North Carolina woman, Stephanie Chavis, was sentenced today to 65 months in prison and three years of supervised release for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.  Chavis was also ordered to pay $760,966 in restitution to the Social Security Administration.  On April 16, 2019, Chavis pled guilty to the charges. 

According to court documents and other information presented in court, Chavis was an Operations Supervisor at the Fayetteville offices of the Social Security Administration (SSA).  SSA administers monetary aid to the public through federally funded programs, including the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI), which authorizes monthly payments to qualifying individuals who are 65 years or older, blind, or disabled, and who meet certain income and resource criteria.

In her capacity as an Operations Supervisor, Chavis had access to SSA beneficiary accounts and associated personal identifying information (PII).  Between approximately August 2010 and April 2018, Chavis caused over $760,000 in SSI benefits to be electronically deposited into nine different bank accounts held in her name, and in the names of various family members, by making false and fraudulent representations to fellow SSA employees, including claims representatives and other supervisors.  ...

New FOIA Disclosures

      Social Security has uploaded a number of "proactive disclosures" to its Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) reading room. Read and enjoy.

SSI Class Action

      A class action lawsuit has been filed in the Eastern District of New York dealing with the poor service that the Social Security Administration has afforded Supplemental Security Income claimants since the pandemic began, particularly in regard to how that poor service has created or increased overpayments and the agency’s inability to cope with the overpayments other than by seizing current benefits without giving the claimants involved a reasonable opportunity to request waiver of the overpayments.

     Overall, SSI claimants and recipients have fared horribly during the pandemic. Regardless of the merits of this lawsuit, they deserve much better.

Poll

survey software

CR Passed

      Congress has passed and the President has signed a continuing resolution (CR) that allows the federal government to continue operations and spending money at the same rate as in the fiscal year that ended at midnight last night. This goes through December 3. The Social Security Administration received no special treatment in the CR.

MDW Mess

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

Objective 

To determine the effectiveness of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) controls for resolving high-priority requests sent via the modernized development worksheet (MDW) process.

Background 

Because SSA’s processing centers (PC), teleservice centers, and field offices have different processing roles and systems access, SSA employees are often required to contact other offices to request case processing assistance. Employees use MDWs, manually designated as either routine or high priority, to send requests for action to other field offices or PCs. Per SSA policy, high-priority MDW requests should be limited to situations that involve awards and disallowance of claims; start- and stop- payment actions; appeals; congressional inquiries; and public-relations issues. According to SSA’s policy, employees should follow up on unresolved high-priority requests after 20 calendar days. 

From SSA’s Processing Center Action Control System, we identified 121,376 benefit records with high- priority MDWs pending at PCs as of January 28, 2020. Of these, 82,439 (68 percent) had MDWs that were pending for at least 60 days. We reviewed a random sample of 100 benefit records with high-priority MDWs pending at least 60 days.

Findings 

SSA does not have effective controls for resolving high-priority requests sent via the MDW process. As a result, SSA made improper or delayed payments and inflated PC backlogs, which impeded efforts to improve customer service. For 51 of the 100 sampled benefit records, SSA did not resolve the high-priority MDWs or resolved them longer than 60 days after field office and teleservice center employees sent them to the PCs. ...

For the remaining 49 benefit records, employees (1) resolved the high-priority MDWs but did not clear them or (2) made incorrect inputs on MDW requests. We estimate SSA’s management information was inflated by over 40,000 high-priority MDWs, which further decreased the effectiveness of the MDW process. ...

     So much to unpack here. Note that the systems used by the payment centers, teleservice centers and field offices don't really talk with each other very well so Social Security had to come up with the MDW process but that's not really working so well. It sounds like the system has almost completely broken down if it ever worked to begin with. Even when the MDWs are "resolved", often there are errors in the "resolution." And, oh yes, note the special treatment for "public relations issues."

     This isn't a video game. Real people suffer lengthy delays in the payment of benefits owed them. Many of these problems never get resolved without frequent external pressure from attorneys representing claimants.

How Did This Get Published?

      The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has posted a "working paper" by Cody Tuttle and Riley Wilson on The Impact of Claimant Representation Fee Schedules on the Disability Applicant Process and Recipient Outcomes. Tuttle and Wilson seek to prove the hypothesis that after the maximum fee that can be charged by an attorney for representing a Social Security claimant was increased in 2002 and 2009 that attorneys delayed their clients' cases so that they could draw the now higher maximum attorney fee. The two had one big problem. While they had data showing that wait times had increased in general they didn't have data that distinguished represented from unrepresented claimants. They "solved" this problem by assuming that the overall increase in average wait times was solely due to a large increase in wait times just for unrepresented claimants with the unrepresented claimants suffering no such delays. I would call this a whopping leap of faith. The researchers noted that the country was in recession both in 2002 and 2009 and wondered whether that might have something to do with it. The possibility that things were going on specifically at Social Security that caused increased backlogs for represented and unrepresented claimants alike appears to have not occurred to them. Actually, things were going on at Social Security in both those years. You can take a look at a GAO study from 2002 and a New York Times piece from the same year on increasing backlog problems at the agency. Here are some stats from 2009 showing wild increases in backlogs in that year. You can understand why backlogs might have been increasing in those years by looking at the chart above. Click on it to view full size. Note that in 2002 and 2009 claims were increasing a lot faster than awards. Why would that be? Awards were trailing because of increased backlogs.

     How did a "working paper" this shoddy get published? Was this nonsense peer reviewed by anyone?