A System That Trips Up 82% Of Those Who Attempt To Navigate It Is A Failed System

    From Work Overpayments Among New Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries, a just released study by Denise Hoffman, Monica Farid, Serge Lukashanets, Michael T. Anderson, and John T. Jones:

This paper studies the experiences of the 2008 cohort of first-time Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries who were at risk of overpayment because they engaged in substantial gainful activity (SGA) after completing the trial work period and grace period (work incentives allowing beneficiaries to test work). ...

The paper found the following:

• Among a sample of 31,520 2008 first-time Social Security Disability Insurance awardees at risk of a work-related overpayment, 82 percent (25,846) were overpaid in the first 10 years after award.
• Among those overpaid within 10 years of award, half of all overpayments began in the first four years after award.
• Nearly all overpayments (89 percent) began in the first month of SGA after exhausting trial work period and grace period months. ...

Social Security Claimants Need To Ask For Help From Their Members Of Congress

    From David Weaver writing for The Hill:

While it is not uncommon for someone upset about a law to be told “You should call Congress,” the reality is that Congress is supposed to do more than just legislate. Early in American history, some of the most important work Congress performed was constituent service. For example, members of Congress often needed to help Revolutionary War veterans secure pensions promised by the government.

It’s the same today.

Constituent service is as important as ever in part because federal agencies are struggling to serve the public effectively. This can be seen in recent press reports that elderly and disabled people have had to wait in long lines in the hot sun of Florida, New Mexico, and Texas just to get service from understaffed local Social Security offices. ...

Why is this happening? Because appropriators in the current Congress cut nearly $1 billion from President Biden’s customer service budget for the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Congress fully expects that the complaining public will gripe to SSA, not to Congress. ...

Given that Congress is the root cause of the problem, it’s reasonable to think it should be part of the solution.

Providing greater levels of constituent service is one way Congress can help. ...

Congress needs to appreciate the consequences of its poor decisions on funding — and needs to try to perform better in the future.    

Today, it is easy for Congress to systematically underfund federal agencies and then hide behind those agencies (or even blame them) when things get ugly. Putting Congress on the front lines of service will — in a very real fashion — force elected leaders and congressional staff to deal with the mistakes they make. ...

    It's an old dodge. Underfund the agency and then blame poor service on agency leadership. Social Security management has the inevitable problems one would expect at a large agency but that's not why people have to line up before dawn outside Social Security field offices. That's 100% the fault of elected officials and particularly Republican elected officials who like to "cut it until it bleeds and then complain about the blood stains", to quote an old line.

Good Luck Getting Through On The Phone

     From the E-Verify website: 

Starting July 15, 2022, employees whose E-Verify cases are referred to SSA on or after July 15, 2022, will have the normal 8 federal working days to contact their local SSA office to begin resolving the mismatch. At the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in March 2020, E-Verify extended the timeframe for an employee to take action to resolve a Social Security (SSA) Tentative Nonconfirmation (mismatch). E-Verify cases referred on or after July 15, 2022, E-Verify will no longer provide extended timeframes for employees to visit SSA to resolve these mismatches. E-Verify cases referred between March 2, 2020 to July 14, 2022, with a SSA mismatch will still have an extended timeframe to be resolved ...

Employees Give Social Security Poor Ratings

     The Partnership for Public Service has issued its annual survey results on "The Best Places to Work in the Federal Government." The Social Security Administration was ranked 15 out of 17 large agencies.     

    Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) ranked dead last out of 432 agency sub-components. Among other agency subcomponents, the Deputy Commissioner for Budget, Finance, Quality, Management ranked 122, Office of General Counsel ranked 220, Deputy Commissioner for Retirement & Disability Policy ranked 281, Deputy Commissioner for Operations (DCO) ranked 391, and Deputy Commissioner for Hearings Operations ranked 415.  

    Agency sub-components are ranked in many dimensions. Notably, DCO is ranked 429 out of 432 for work-life balance and OIG is ranked dead last for effective senior leaders. OIG ranked at or near the bottom in many dimensions.

Theresa Gruber, Head Of OHO, Alleged To Be Exhibiting Signs Of Serious Impairment

     From the Washington Post:

When the Social Security Administration’s inspector general investigated allegations earlier this year that one of the agency’s senior leaders was routinely impaired on the job, six witnesses painted an alarming picture.

Theresa Gruber, a deputy commissioner overseeing around 9,000 employees and a $1.2 billion budget in the hearings and appeals operation, displayed “significant anomalies” at work over the course of at least a year, including slurred speech in which she “appeared intoxicated,” leaving meetings without notice, slouching in her chair and aggressive behavior, witnesses told investigators.

 But five months after acting Social Security commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi was presented with the internal report, which The Washington Post obtained, Gruber remains on the job. The allegations by witnesses were corroborated to The Post by three members of Gruber’s senior staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In recent months, Inspector General Gail Ennis’s office has received more formal complaints about Gruber’s conduct, according to people with knowledge of the communications. She has continued to act erratically, three agency employees said, and in recent weeks has missed several meetings of her leadership team. ...

 Staff members told investigators that while they did not directly witness Gruber consuming alcohol on the job, her comportment led them to wonder if she had been drinking. Gruber, 53, is also diabetic, the report notes, a condition that, when poorly treated, can cause irritability, disorientation or slurred speech. She told a close circle of colleagues that she was dealing with medical issues stemming from the condition, according to the report. ...

One high-ranking official interviewed by The Post described a “rudderless” department under Gruber, who sometimes does not communicate with her staff for days at a time, the official said. “She is MIA, and they’re not holding anyone accountable,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss matters publicly. Another official described “delays to decision-making” and important meetings and difficulty getting Gruber’s attention — factors they say threaten the department’s mission to conduct impartial hearings and issue decisions on appeals involving retirement and survivor and disability benefits for poor and elderly Americans. ...

House Approprations Committee Report On FY 2023 Bill Covering SSA

    From the House Committee Report on the FY 2023 appropriations bill covering the Social Security Administration (the Social Security part begins on page 315):

...  Within the total recommended increase, the Committee expects SSA to direct not less than $630,000,000 for field offices, teleservice centers, and program service centers, and $190,000,000 to replace losses and build capacity at the State Disability Determination Services (DDS) agencies that make disability determinations for SSA. ...

The Committee continues to consider the Final Rule ‘‘Hearings Held by Administrative Appeals Judges of the Appeals Council’’ (85 Fed. Reg. 73138, December 16, 2020) to be an unjustified erosion of due process for individuals who are appealing a denial of Social Security or SSI benefits. ...

The Committee directs SSA to submit a report to the Committee within 180 days of enactment of this Act exploring the feasibility of using employee incentives, including an agency student loan repayment program, to improve recruitment and retention for qualified candidates across the agency. ...

The Committee understands that the Office of Hearings Operations (OHO) relies on legal assistants to conduct a broad range of work supporting hearings and reviewing work of its administrative law judges, and urges SSA to examine the position descriptions of legal assistants, pay and actual work conducted, to ensure that job classifications and compensation are commensurate with current duties. ...

    Note that this is only the House version. The Senate version will be different. The Reports aren't mandatory in any case. Only the enacted provisions are mandatory. However, agencies ignore the Committee reports at their peril.

The Reports Of COBOL's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

     In recent years many have decried Social Security's reliance on old mainframe computers running programs written in the very old COBOL language. Many have thought this to be a major problem holding back progress at Social Security. As this New York Times article demonstrates, maybe using COBOL isn't bad at all. At the least, COBOL remains in common use:

Caitlin Mooney is 24 years old and infatuated with technology that dates to the age of Sputnik.

Mooney, a recent New Jersey Institute of Technology graduate in computer science, is a fan of technologies that were hot a half-century ago, including computer mainframes and software called COBOL that powers them. That stuff won’t win any cool points in Silicon Valley, but it is essential technology at big banks, insurance companies, government agencies and other large institutions.

During Mooney’s job hunt, potential employers saw her expertise and wanted to talk about more senior positions than she was seeking. “They would get really excited,” Mooney told me. She’s now trying to decide between multiple job offers.

The resilience of decades-old computing technologies and the people who specialize in them shows that new technologies are often built on lots of old tech.

When you deposit money using your bank’s iPhone app, behind the scenes it probably involves computers that are the progeny of those used in the Apollo moon missions. (Also, half-century-old computer code is baked into the iPhone software.)

It’s often seen as a problem or a punchline that so much musty technology is still around. But it’s not necessarily an issue.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” joked Ellora Praharaj, director of reliability engineering at Stack Overflow, an online forum popular with tech workers. “Students out of school these days don’t necessarily want to work in uncool older languages. But the reality of the world is this is what powers many of our existing systems.”

Praharaj said she learned COBOL in college in the mid-2000s and “hated it.” But until about five years ago, she was regularly using a 1950s computer programming technology called Fortran in a former job in the financial services industry. The old stuff is everywhere.

Latin is dead, but old computer programming languages like COBOL live on. ...

Four Years In Slammer For Former SSA Employee

     From a press release:

Eric Lemoyne Willis, 46, of West Sacramento, was sentenced today to four years in prison for conspiracy to defraud the United States, theft of government property, and aggravated identity theft, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced.

According to court documents, Willis and co-defendants, Darron Dimitri Ross, 36, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Joshua Bilal George, 39, of San Diego, conspired to steal public money from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Willis worked as an SSA Operations Supervisor in Sacramento and Lodi from 2015 until his departure in January 2018. During this timeframe, Willis used his authority as an SSA employee to access the confidential Social Security records of numerous Social Security beneficiaries. These records contained personally identifiable information (PII) including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, account numbers, family information, and benefit payment amounts. Willis would seek out PII for beneficiaries who used direct deposit for payment of large benefits. Willis then gave this PII to Ross who resided in North Carolina.

Ross and George’s roles in these crimes included calling numerous SSA field offices across the country and using the stolen PII to impersonate the beneficiaries. Ross also opened at least 44 online bank accounts under fraudulent identities to receive diverted SSA benefit payments. If Ross succeeded in convincing an SSA representative that he was the beneficiary, he would request that the beneficiary’s direct deposit account be changed to one of the conspirators’ fraudulent accounts. ...