Merry Christmas

 

Christmas Got You Feeling A Little Cranky?

 

Rampant Scamming Of Social Security Recipients

     From Newsweek:

More than $100 million is lost each year due to Social Security scams, new figures from the Federal Trade Commission show.

Already in 2023, the FTC has received reports of 164,413 government imposter scams, with social security scams being the most common of all. The Social Security Administration saw 38,852 reports, with a total of $101.58 million lost to government-impersonating fraudsters. ...

Merry Christmas

 

Workers Say The Physical Demands Of Their Jobs Are Increasing

     From the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:

For obvious reasons, people who do physically demanding work are prone to injuring themselves on the job and are more likely than office workers to apply for federal disability benefits.

But is technology changing this relationship?

We know technology has caused a decline in manual labor, and the blue-collar jobs that remain are also easier to perform when machinery and computers are doing more of the heavy lifting workers used to do – think warehouse robots that alleviate the need to lift and carry heavy boxes.

But new research based on a survey of couples between ages 51 and 61 – a population that is particularly vulnerable to illness and musculoskeletal disabilities – finds no evidence they feel the physical demands on them are lessening. If anything, they said, the requirements for motions like stooping, lifting, or crouching have increased somewhat since the early 1990s.

Their perceptions conflict with the other studies showing an easing in the demands on blue-collar workers. But those studies are not based on what older people are saying about their jobs but on analyses of an occupational database that rates the intensity of the specific tasks required in each job. One example is how many pounds a warehouse worker must lift and how often that is required. ...

Merry Christmas

 

Merry Christmas

 

Now They Make It Public

     I can't say whether this is related to the recent publicity concerning overpayments to Social Security claimants but the agency has decided to make public its longstanding policy of waiving overpayments of less than $1,000 in most cases. The policy has been around for a long time, at least for SSI cases, but it was previously labeled "sensitive" in Social Security's manual and withheld from the public. Now it's out there for everyone to see. The exception to these administrative waivers is cases where the claimant is at fault. My experience is that they only refuse to waive these small overpayments when it's obvious that the claimant is a bad actor.

    Now, how about let's raise that amount from $1,000 to $5,000? How long has it been at $1,000? Also, how about waiving these without demanding that the claimant file a request for waiver? These waivers may be nearly automatic but the big catch is that you have to file a request for waiver. Most of these small overpayments aren't waived because the claimant doesn't know to request waiver or can't figure out how to complete a waiver request form or, perhaps more important, can't get through to a Social Security office to ask what to do.