From Government Executive:
The Social Security Administration has demanded money back from more than 2 million people a year — more than twice as many people as the head of the agency disclosed at an October congressional hearing.
That’s according to a document KFF Health News and Cox Media Group obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration Kilolo Kijakazi read aloud from the document during the hearing but repeatedly left out an entire category of beneficiaries displayed on the paper as well. ...
The document obtained via FOIA shows that the numbers Kijakazi gave at the hearing covered only two of the three Social Security benefit programs. They did not cover Supplemental Security Income, or SSI ...
Kijakazi should have included the SSI numbers or made it clear that she wasn't including them but to defend her more than she deserves, the Social Security Subcommittee has no jurisdiction over SSI. Perhaps more important, while SSI is part of the Social Security Act (Title XVI of it), most of the titles of the Social Security Act cover things like Medicare that aren't generally considered part of "Social Security." To the extent that we consider SSI as part of "Social Security" it's because the Social Security Administration, uh, administers it. Generally, Title II of the Social Security Act (providing old age, survivor and disability benefits based upon work credits) is always what people are thinking about when they refer to "Social Security" but sometimes they're also thinking about SSI.
The Acting Commissioner of Social Security recently made the decision that the agency will, for now, have no involvement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). While I have a healthy skepticism that AI will ever have much role in taking or adjudicating Social Security claims, there's one area where Generative AI may be of considerable assistance and that's dealing with the COBOL problem. Social Security's most important computer programs are written in the ancient COBOL programming language. Many other agencies and private companies are similarly dependent upon COBOL. Schools are no longer teaching COBOL. Computer programmers don't want to work with it. Few programmers are available to work on COBOL programs and those programmers have long since gone gray.
IBM, and probably others, have decided that Generative AI may be the cure for COBOL problems. There would be no need to laboriously rewrite all the old programs in newer programming languages. AI would quickly rewrite the old COBOL programs in modern computer programming languages. Programmers would be more widely available for modern computer languages. Corrections and improvements to existing programs would become easier. That would be a godsend to Social Security, if it works.
From Emergency Message EM-21065 REV, Guidelines for Using Occupational Information in Electronic Tools issued yesterday (emphasis added):
In making disability determinations, SSA relies primarily on the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (including its companion publication, the Selected Characteristics of Occupations (SCO)) for information about the requirements of work in the national economy. The SSA Digital Library hosts three searchable databases developed by SkillTRAN for the DOT. Adjudicators may use these tools to help make an assessment at step four (see 20 CFR 404.1560(b)(2) and 416.960(b)(2)) or step five (see 20 CFR 404.1566(d), 404.1568(d)(2), 416.966(d), and 416.968(d)(2)) of the sequential evaluation process. ...
