Happy Halloween

 

ERE Only Partially Functional

     Social Security's ERE system that attorneys use to access their clients' files is only partially functional this morning.

    Does this also affect Social Security's internal systems?

Children Being Raised By Their Grandparents Poorly Served By Social Security

     From How Can Social Security Children's Benefits Help Grandparents Raise Grandchildren?, by Liu, Siyan, and Laura D. Quinby of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:

In 2020, around two million grandparents were responsible for the basic needs of their grandchildren, with grandparent care concentrated in historically disadvantaged communities. Despite being particularly vulnerable to financial insecurity, most grandparents are ineligible for formal support -- such as subsidies for foster parents, housing assistance, and Social Security dependent child benefits -- because they raise their grandchildren outside of the foster care system. Using the Health and Retirement Study and American Community Survey, this study documents how grandparent caregivers differ from typical grandparents in terms of time and money spent on grandchildren, demographic characteristics, and economic resources. It then evaluates how their finances would improve if eligibility for child benefits were aligned with the more lenient tax criteria for claiming a dependent grandchild.

    Being "outside of the foster care system" is definitely a problem but the Social Security aspect of it is that if you're on retirement benefits from Social Security, only your minor children and adult children who became disabled before age 22 can obtain child's benefits on your account. Your grandchildren are only eligible for these child benefits under very limited circumstances. 

    The children could get benefits if the grandparents adopted them but the grandparents are generally scared to try. The problem is that usually the children come to live with their grandparents because the parents have serious problems with substance abuse, other mental illness or are abusive. The grandparents are scared to rock the boat with an adoption petition. The parents may take the children back to a disordered, dangerous environment.

    The Social Security Act could be altered to give children's benefits to grandchildren in the custody of their grandparents. A change along these lines would certainly be family friendly but at this point no Social Security legislation, whatever its merits, can pass Congress.

A Question

     I know that many would like to turn over disability determination to artificial intelligence but there’s no gold standard for disability determination so let’s start out a little simpler. Could artificial intelligence be trained to do windfall offset calculations at Social Security? They're the agency's bane. They eat up tons of employee time. I'm sure that everyone familiar with the problem knows that there ought to be some computer fix. The Social Security Administration has tried two different windfall offset software packages in the past. Both cost in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars and both failed spectacularly. Is AI different?

   

U.S. Retirement Systems Score Poorly

     From Michael Hiltzik writing for the Los Angeles Times:

Back in my school days, a “C” grade was a certification of rank mediocrity. That’s the right way to think about a recent scorecard on which the U.S. retirement system scored an inexcusably deficient C+.

That grade placed the U.S. behind Netherlands, Iceland and Israel (all A’s); and Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland (all solid B’s or B+). If you’re looking for bragging rights, the U.S. came in about even with France.

The scores come to us from the business consulting firm Mercer, which ranked 47 national pension systems for its Global Pension Index on standards such as adequacy, sustainability (including the reliability of funding) and integrity (such as the regulation of private pension providers). ...

Among the particular shortcomings of the American system identified by the Mercer team is that it leaves too many workers out in the cold, including gig workers and lower-income blue-collar employees. ...

But if you’re hoping that things will improve for American retirees in the near future, the accession of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) to the post of House speaker should give you pause. Johnson is a long-term advocate of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits through changes such as raising the retirement and eligibility ages for the programs.

He also has advocated scrutinizing the cost of those programs through a “bipartisan debt commission” that inevitably would place them in the deficit-reduction cauldron along with other spending. After his rise to the speaker’s chair Wednesday, Johnson immediately promised to create this panel. ...

Brute Force Needed

    At yesterday's House Social Security Subcommittee hearing all of the members were struggling under the illusion that agency management could seriously address agency backlogs. I have my own ideas for what the agency could do but I'm not under the illusion that they would seriously address backlogs. More money is the only thing that will work; "brute force" as former Commissioner Astrue described it when the agency was in a backlog situation not as serious as the current one.

Hearing Scheduled For O'Malley Nomination

    The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing on the nomination of Martin O'Malley to become Commissioner of Social Security for 10:00 on November 2.

Congressional Hearing

     The written materials submitted by witnesses at today's House Social Security Subcommittee are now available online. They're mostly predictable and uninteresting to me. I didn't have the time to watch but please post your summary if you did.