Seizure Of Social Security Benefits To Satisfy Student Loan Debt Suspended Until November

      From CNBC:

The U.S. Department of Education has suspended the seizure of tax refunds, Social Security and other government payments to satisfy defaulted student loans until November, the agency said.

About 9 million people have a federal student loan in default, which means they’ve fallen at least 270 days behind on payments.

     Why is it that the government has the power to seize Social Security benefits to collect on a student loan debt? We don't allow collection of other debts in this way. For that matter, why is it nearly impossible to discharge a student loan debt in bankruptcy? 

     I ask clients if they have outstanding student loan debts. I'd say that 90% have no student loan debt and are surprised at the question. The other 10% are surprised to find out that being disabled may have an effect on their student loans. It's like asking about disabled children. Most of my clients don't have disabled children so the question doesn't matter to them but for that minority of my clients who have disabled children, it matters a lot.

Slow Reaction Time

      On August 24, 2020 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in Maxwell v. Saul, 971 F.3d 1128, holding that coming up with two job titles to which a claimant could transfer skills isn't enough to support a finding of transferable skills. Since that time the agency has been thinking about what to do about the Maxwell decision. It's still thinking about whether to issue an Acquiescence Ruling but it's now told its staff to follow Maxwell in the 9th Circuit.

     I don't know whether to attribute this extraordinary delay to a sclerosed decision-making process or stubborness. Maybe they're both contributing factors.

Heavy Telework Usage At Social Security Compared To Other Agencies With Predictable Results

     From a recent report by the Government Accountability Office GAO:

 

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... The Social Security Administration (SSA), for example, reported that it faced challenges transitioning the work of its call center operators to a telework environment. According to SSA, nearly 4,000 of its customer call center agents did not telework prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. SSA explained that it was in the initial stages of replacing its telephone infrastructure at the onset of the pandemic and the transition to maximum telework required the agency to re-engineer the way it used current technology to provide all customer call center agents the ability to answer calls until its new agency-wide telephone system could be installed. When SSA transitioned to maximum telework in March 2020, the agency said it had enough equipment for only about one-third of these agents to perform their duties while teleworking.

SSA officials told us that call center agents without remote equipment were placed on administrative leave or weather and safety leave. Additionally, it took a couple of weeks for the agency to provide the customer call center agents on leave with the essential equipment that allowed them to telework. However, SSA officials reported that internet connectivity issues created challenges for employees receiving calls on its 800-customer service number. As a result, SSA operated with a limited number of employees available to respond to the 800 number calls from the public. This resulted in longer-than-normal call-wait times. SSA officials said that by June 2020, they had equipped employees with necessary technology to answer the increasing number of calls while teleworking.

SSA’s Office of the Inspector General reported that only 27 percent of teleservice center employees were answering calls on the national 800-number in mid-March of 2020. As of October 2020, according to the report, nearly all call center employees were answering calls, with approximately 1 percent on weather and safety leave who were unable to answer calls remotely due to internet connectivity issues. The report also stated that while SSA reduced the amount of callers receiving a busy message, this was partially enabled by reducing hours for the national 800-number. ...

What Does It Tell You If Less Than Half Of People File Their Social Security Retirement Claims Online?

      From a piece by Alicia Munnell, the director of the Boston College Center for Retirement Research for Market Watch:

The Social Security Administration faces an enormous challenge to maintain its services as retiring baby boomers increase the demand and budget constraints and retiring staff limit the agency’s capacity to deliver.  ...

To investigate how individuals claimed or intend to claim their retirement benefits, my colleague JP Aubry surveyed 2,600 people ages 57-70. The responses showed that, while 60% of respondents applied or intend to apply online (a somewhat higher share than the SSA data show), only 43% of respondents claim completely online — that is, without contacting SSA in-person or by phone. Scaling the survey results to the SSA data for online applications suggests that 37% of retirees claim completely online  ...

To better understand the factors associated with online claiming patterns, JP estimated a regression that relates respondents’ demographic characteristics to full online claiming (see Figure 3). Two of the characteristics most associated with claiming completely online are the use of online banking and Turbo Tax — both of which are proxies for a high level of comfort with online financial tools. Additionally, claiming completely online is associated with living in a metropolitan area, being college educated, and being married. On the other hand, the characteristics most associated with not claiming completely online are — essentially — being nonwhite. ...

In response to in-depth questioning, respondents identified four reasons for contacting an SSA representative: 1) complex issues that clearly require an SSA representative, such as discussing the specifics of spousal and survivor benefits; 2) general aversions to online services, like a concern about data privacy; 3) straightforward inquiries that could be addressed without contacting a representative, like checking the benefit amount and eligibility; and 4) obstacles to online claiming that could be remedied by SSA service improvements, such as fixing data errors.  ...

     Note that this piece concerns retirement claims, not the more complicated survivor claims, not to mention the vastly more complicated disability and SSI claims.

It Really Is A Struggle

     "NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with economy reporter Chabeli Carrazana from The 19th News about women whose spouses and children have died of COVID struggling to seek benefits from Social Security offices."

Fee Cap Chokes Claimant Representation

     From The Legal Intelligencer (registration required):

A limit on the fees attorneys may collect on Social Security cases has remained unchanged for nearly 13 years, leaving some smaller firms and solo practitioners struggling to keep their practices running as inflation and costs of business outpace their earnings.

The stagnating cap has has resulted in a practice area that both fails to attract new talent and drives established practitioners to seek out more profitable types of law, say some Social Security attorneys. Those attorneys say the drain on resources is creating a smaller pool of representation available to vulnerable populations that will ultimately lead to fewer claimants getting the help they need.

In June 2009, the Social Security Administration raised the previous maximum limit for fee agreements under Section 206 of the Social Security Act from $5,300 (adjusted in 2002) to $6,000 in order to “adequately compensate representatives for their services while ensuring that claimants are protected from excessive fees.”

That limit has not been adjusted since. ...

According to National Organization of Social Security Claimants president David Camp, the tax that Social Security imposes for releasing the fee—currently 6.3%—has continued to go up in that time, as have most other business costs. 

“Nobody likes to say they want more money,” said Camp, “but at some point, when you’re operating a small business or when you’re a solo attorney with maybe one assistant, it’s very hard to have a payroll … and it’s been brutal, and it’s now been 13 years.” ...

Tim Cuddigan of Omaha-based Cuddigan Law said his firm had to adapt the services it offered about five years ago when it became clear that the cap wasn’t going to change any time soon. Cuddigan Law’s focus on Social Security disability proved unable to generate enough income to support the three-attorney firm, so it supplemented its offerings with a veterans disability practice. 

“The rent has gone up, salaries have gone up, insurance has gone up, and the fee cap hasn’t gone up,” said Cuddigan. 

“It’s become this low-wage way to practice law, and such an unfortunate overall reduction in the number of people that are willing to do it,” Camp said.

Camp and Cuddigan said they have seen fewer law school graduates looking to enter the field as well as experienced attorneys leaving behind their Social Security practices because of the low pay. They said in some cases small firms and solos have gone out of business. ...

Appropriation Framework Agreed To

      There's now an announced framework for appropriations bills for this fiscal year. This means that Social Security will get an appropriation for this fiscal year. That's a big deal for everybody concerned with Social Security. Employees get overtime and the hope of some relief from the mountains of work hanging over their heads. Claimants and their attorneys get some improvements in service, perhaps from unimaginably bad to terribly bad. No one should hope for too much relief. The agency may need a 20% increase in its appropriation and that's not coming.

     We don't know the details of the agreement. We do know that Democrats had wanted much bigger appropriations for domestic agencies than for defense agencies. Republicans had demanded equal improvements for appropriations across domestic and defense.

     The continuing resolution that's making its way to the President's desk right now runs through March 11. Expect action on the appropriations bill that includes Social Security (the Labor-HHS bill) not much before that date. The Labor-HHS appropriation bill is usually the most complicated and controversial of the appropriations bills. This framework agreement only takes things so far.

Reopening Worries

      From Federal News Network:

The Social Security Administration struck a recent deal with its unions to return employees to the office by the end of March.

Both parties are in talks to negotiate the finer points of that office reentry, but officials say SSA leadership isn’t giving much ground on key elements of office reentry, such as telework, or initially opening SSA field offices on an appointment-only basis.

The American Federation of Government Employees Local Council 220, which represents about 23,000 SSA employees, said agency leadership is pursuing a “business as usual” reentry plan that would fully reopen fields offices to walk-in service. ...

Digeronimo said the union is seeking clarification on how employees working in teleservice centers will socially distance themselves from coworkers once they all return to the office, and whether they will need to wear masks all day while answering phone calls.

AFGE Council 220 is also requesting SSA field offices initially open on an appointment-only basis, to prevent overcrowding and protect the elderly and disabled population that SSA serves. ...

“We recognize the doors need to be open, but we are putting forward some progressive ideas to leverage technology so that we give the public a multitude of ways to contact us and to conduct business with us. But the agency is not willing to listen. They are antiquated in their thinking, and it is just easier for them to just go back to business as usual, which in our mind, is not safe,” Digeronimo said. ...

SSA managers, meanwhile, share many of the same concerns about office re-entry. An email compiling comments from SSA managers to agency leadership shows front-line managers and supervisors are frustrated that the agency has not considered feedback from frontline managers in office reopening. ...

     Meanwhile, in the real world, while Covid remains dangerous, the danger is rapidly receding. Yes, we can posit the possibility of some new variant but that hasn't happened yet and may not. This epidemic will enter its endemic phase at some point and there is every appearance that we are very near this point. Nobody at Social Security is saying that field offices will reopen to the public if there's some dangerous new variant but if there's not, the end of March certainly seems like a reasonable time for reopening.

     Let's remember that federal employees, including federal managers, are an extremely cautious lot. That's why they chose the security of working for the government in the first place. The public can reasonably expect that Social Security's actions will not be dictated by Nervous Nellies, especially those who have taken a liking to working from home and that number includes some managers.