Merry Christmas

 

Kijakazi And The Presidential Prayer Team

     The Acting Commissioner of Social Security, Kililo Kijakazi, is listed as an Executive Prayer Leader for the Presidential Prayer Team, which apparently does what its name suggests. It organizes prayer on behalf of the President of the United States. Many members of Congress are members of the Presidential Prayer Team, including many Republicans who certainly don't give one the impression that they regard Joe Biden as their brother in Christ.

Merry Christmas

 

Kijakazi Made A Mistake

    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.

Merry Christmas

 

What's At Stake For SSA With Generative AI

     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.

Merry Christmas

 

Social Security Says Don't Rely On SkillTRAN For Numbers Of Jobs

     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. ...

 [The three searchable databases] contain DOT and SCO occupational information developed by the United States Department of Labor (DOL). This information is useful, but it does not replace SSA policy or adjudicative judgment and decision-making. While the DOT and SCO are acceptable sources of occupational information for adjudicating disability claims, they also contain (1) information that must not be used in disability adjudication because our rules and subregulatory guidance do not permit it and (2) information of which we do not take administrative notice. ...

Federal agencies now publish labor market information by the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code. Those with vocational expertise use various approaches to arrive at informed estimates of numbers of jobs that exist within a DOT occupation. Results may differ given the method used for the estimate. We have not reviewed and do not specifically endorse the SkillTRAN proprietary algorithm. ...

    To explain, in responding to hypothetical questions, vocational experts testifying at hearings on Social Security disability claims give lists of jobs that a hypothetical claimant could perform. They also testify to the numbers of such jobs in the economy. The numbers of jobs figures come from a propriety program, SkillTRAN. I think that everyone who has looked at this issue, including Administrative Law Judges, knows that those SkillTRAN numbers are bull. Social Security is finally acknowledging this. 

    Will this affect cases where these numbers have already been cited in decisions? We'll see.