Worsening Service

      Lisa Rein at the Washington Post has a piece up on Social Security’s worsening service delivery problems, including a quote from me that some of you might not like.

ARS Down

     Social Security's Appointed Representative Services (ARS), also known as ERE, that allows attorneys and others representing claimants to access their client's files went down yesterday and is still down this morning. I heard that there were some problems yesterday for Social Security employees but do not know whether they are still having problems. There's been no announcement from the agency about this outage.

    Social Security should make an announcement about this sort of thing when it becomes extended as this episode has. You can pretend that there's no problem but people like me can't.

Some Projections From The Acting Commissioner

     From a statement attached to a letter from the Acting Commissioner to the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee:

... We anticipate that some performance measures will show improvement in FY 2023 [in processing of initial claims at the Disability Determination Services], while others may show temporary degradation. We will process 129,000 or 7 percent more initial disability claims than in FY 2022 (52-week measure). However, wait times for a disability decision at the initial and appeal levels will increase for a period of time because backlogs will continue to grow while we hire and train new staff. ...

As of December 2022, we reduced our pending number of hearings to about 355,000 and reduced the average wait time for a hearing to 442 days from the peak of 633 days in September 2017. We are currently experiencing a temporary increase in the average processing time because we are working through our oldest cases for individuals who chose to wait for an in-person hearing rather than accepting a video or telephone hearing when our offices were closed to the public during the pandemic. We project that our monthly average processing time for hearings will be 390 days at the end of FY 2023. ...

In FY 2023, we expect to transition our National 800 Number to a modern telecommunication platform, improving service and providing more self-service opportunities for the public. In FY 2023, we estimate our speed of answer will be approximately 35 minutes compared to 33 minutes in FY 2022, while our busy rate will be 15 percent compared to 6 percent in FY 2022. ...

    Despite the discouraging figures actually presented, the overall tone of the statement is quite positive. I don't know why you'd sugarcoat the situation. Overall, things will keep getting worse until Social Security gets enough money to operate the agency. There's no way to manage the agency out of this mess. It will take more warm bodies to get the work done and that costs money.

Sounds Good To Me

     From Marketwatch:

Social Security should be able to pay out full benefits until 2035 without any intervention, but a proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders would extend the life of the program for 75 years, chief actuary Stephen Goss said.  ...     

The Social Security Expansion Act aims not only to pay out full benefits but, as the name implies, to bolster the program. Under the proposal, Social Security would provide an additional $2,400 in benefits to each beneficiary every year. The program would also be linked to the experimental price index for the elderly, or CPI-E, instead of the consumer-price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers, or CPI-W. The switch would change the cost-of-living adjustment to align more closely with older Americans’ spending. 

 The proposal calls for two new taxes: a 12.4% tax on investment income for individuals earning $250,000 or more per year, and a 16.2% net-investment-income tax for specific business owners, including active S-corporation holders and active limited partners. The proceeds of the latter tax would be divided between the retirement and disability trust funds and the general Treasury fund. ...

     This isn't happening, at least not now. There wouldn't be a majority in the Senate for this and the House is under the nominal control of the GOP. I mention it because it's an honest attempt to deal with the problem, unlike ridiculous Republican claims that they want to "reform" Social Security, without raising taxes or cutting benefits.

    What I love seeing in response to proposals like this is the cynical argument that it does no good to raise taxes on the wealthy. They'll just use tax tricks to avoid paying the tax. Sure. So why do these wealthy people employ shills to spread the cynical argument in forums like this? Who else but shills would spread that sort of garbage? Of course the wealthy would pay more under Senator Sanders' proposal. That's why they fight it with such vigor.

Proposal To Omit Food From SSI In-Kind Support And Maintenance Calculations

     To appear in tomorrow's Federal Register:

We propose to update our regulations to remove food from the calculation of In-Kind Support and Maintenance (ISM). We also propose to add conforming language to our definition of income, excluding food from the ISM calculation. Accordingly, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) applicants and recipients would no longer need to provide information about their food expenses for us to consider in our ISM calculations. We expect that these changes will simplify our rules, making them less cumbersome to administer and easier for the public to understand and follow. These simplifications would make it easier for SSI applicants and recipients to comply with our program requirements, which would save time for both them and us, and improve the equitable treatment of food assistance within the SSI program. The proposed rule also includes other, minor revisions to the regulations related to income, including clarifying our longstanding position that income may be received “constructively” (we will define this term below).

    Remember, this is only a proposal. At best, it will be many months before this comes into effect.

Deaths Of Children And Social Security Disability

    If you're directly involved with Social Security's process of disability determination, have you noticed the number of claimants who have suffered the death of a child? I've got no numbers but I've been struck over the years by how frequently this comes up. I'm talking about adult children as well as young children. I'm talking about deaths from disease as well as death in accidents and assaults and death by drug overdose. We all know these deaths occur and that they're tragic but, thank goodness, it's uncommon. Yet, it seems that once a month I'm seeing a case. We all know that these deaths have terrible effects upon families when they do occur. Most of the time it's not psychiatric illness that gets the claimant but a very real physical ailment.

    I wish someone would do a study on this.

    I don't know how people survived in the bad old days when childhood deaths were so common. My own grandmother was a generally cheerful woman and certainly a wonderful person to me but there always seemed a tinge of sadness about her. I only found out later that she had lost two children to a typhoid epidemic before my father was born and was never quite the same again. (Yes, I'm that old but typhoid epidemics aren't as far back in this country's history as you might think.) I now possess a memorial quilt that she made after these deaths. I'm sure that making that quilt helped with her grief.

Wait Times Are Terrible

      From CNET:

In December about the status of their disability benefits applications. The average wait time for a decision was seven months, the longest it's been in 14 years, according to a recent report from USA Facts.

Jeff Nesbit, deputy communications commissioner for Social Security, said years of inadequate funding means the agency "cannot keep up with the demand for service and our annual fixed cost increases." 

Disability Determination Services, which assesses disability claims, has been hit particularly hard, Nesbit wrote in a September 2022 memo, "due to historically high attrition as workloads become less reasonable with fewer staff."

I'm Sure It Seemed Like Easy Money At The Time

     From a press release:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Takiyah Gordon Austin, age 47, formerly of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty yesterday before U.S. District Court Judge Malachy E. Mannion, for a scheme to fraudulently obtain unemployment benefits related to COVID-19 emergency relief funds. ...

Takiyah Gordon Austin engaged in a scheme to abuse her position as a claims specialist for the Social Security Administration in order to obtain the personally identifiable information of unsuspecting individuals. Austin then utilized that information to file for and receive fraudulent Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims and benefit payments.  As part of the scheme, Austin also filed PUA claims for ineligible individuals in exchange for payment from the individuals. 

    The fraud pulled in over $288,000. She was charged with wire fraud among other offenses. Wire fraud has a 20 year maximum jail term.