In The Field

     Social Security's front line employees often complain that high level agency managers don't understand problems in the field, that no one listens to them. Whatever else you think of him, Martin O'Malley is getting out into the field. I'm attaching some photos posted on Twitter from his recent visit to the Jacksonville, FL field office. 

    By the way, O'Malley seems no more proficient at taking selfies than I am! Also, by the way, note that image of a motorcycle up on the screen in that last photo. I wonder if the employee was asked to get something up on the screen that had no PII. Could it even be an artificial image added later by Photoshop to avoid the PII problem?

 

     

Social Security Lump Sums Create Medicaid Problems

 

    Newsweek reports on a problem associated with Social Security that Social Security policymakers probably aren't aware of. The woman in the story had to fight for years for Social Security disability benefits. Finally, she was approved and paid but immediately lost her Medicaid. For SSI purposes, when she received that lump sum of back benefits, she had six months to spend it but there's no six month grace period for purposes of Medicaid. She became ineligible immediately. 

    There are things you can do to spend this sort of lump sum rapidly that give you lasting improvement in your life while retaining Medicaid or at least minimizing your period of ineligibility. You can pay off debts, repair your home which is probably in disrepair since you've been so poor, you can pay down your mortgage, replace worn out appliances and furniture, purchase new clothes, visit family members you haven't seen in years, etc. Just don't give any of it away! The problem is that most people who receive a large sum of money from Social Security or from some other source, such as an inheritance or personal injury settlement, don't see the problem coming and have no idea how to cope with it when it arrives. Often, they give the money to a relative or friend to hold for them which is much worse that useless.

They Could Do A Much Better Job If They Weren't So Understaffed

     From Challenges in Recovering Supplemental Security Income Overpayments, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

... SSA made errors on overpayments for 189 (47 percent) of the 400 sampled SSI recipients because it did not follow policies or use all available tools, to prevent, detect, or recover SSI overpayments. For example, overpayments could have been prevented or detected earlier, but employees made errors when they redetermined SSI eligibility. A redetermination is a review of a recipient or couple’s non-medical eligibility factors (that is, income, resources, and living arrangements) to determine whether the recipient or couple is still eligible for, and receiving, the correct SSI payment amount.

Errors also occurred because employees did not always (1) send recipients complete and accurate due-process notices before they initiated recovery of overpayments; (2) follow policy when they processed waivers of overpayments; or (3) follow policy and use available tools to recover overpayments. When SSA identifies an overpayment, it sends the overpaid person written notification of the overpayment’s cause and amount. Overpayment recovery can begin 60 days after SSA notifies the recipient of the overpayment if they have not requested a waiver of the overpayment collection or a reconsideration of the overpayment facts. If the individual is receiving SSI payments, SSA should begin recovery by withholding from ongoing payments. If the individual is no longer receiving SSI payments, SSA should attempt collection through various means including withholding from ongoing payments to a liable representative payee or spouse, cross-program recovery, referral for external collection through the Department of the Treasury or pursuing recovery from estates.

We estimate SSA did not follow its policies or use all available tools to prevent, detect, or recover SSI overpayments for 1.9 million recipients. For 1.7 million of these recipients, we estimated error amounts totaling over $7 billion. ...

    Not only does Social Security lack the manpower to do what OIG recommends, OIG fails to recognize that most of these SSI overpayments are small so going after all of them using every possible mechanism would not be cost-effective.

$81 Million AI Contract

     From a press release:

Accenture Federal Services has won an $81 million artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML) contract from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The company will deliver end-to-end back office intelligent automation services to transform the way 250 million retiree and survivors’ benefits documents are processed every year. The forms are currently being received and managed via email, mail, and fax.

The Social Security Administration has already successfully deployed an enterprise hyperautomation platform that uses advanced deep learning and computer vision techniques to identify data from the agency’s electronic folder, extract text, transcribe data with the highest level of accuracy, and speed processing through downstream business processes. The platform uses internal enterprise data to intelligently and rapidly keep pace with high demand, expedite decision making, and control costs.

Accenture Federal Services will now take this project to the next level providing the licenses necessary to deliver an end-to-end, Infrastructure as a Software (IaaS) roadmap for intelligent automation installation, testing, and training. ...

Not Now, Not Later, Not Ever

     A Richmond, VA television station reports on a local case. SSI disability benefits were approved almost immediately for a child with a rare genetic disorder but the case has been sitting at the local Social Security field office for five months awaiting payment. 

    Undoubtedly, there's some complication. Anything complicated goes into the "Not now, not later, not ever" pile. They'll get to it when they have time but they never do. Why spend the time to complete action on one difficult case when you can easily process five uncomplicated cases in the same amount of time? Except that in this case they will because the case has been publicized.

    Is this happening because the Social Security employees are lazy? No, they're just overwhelmed with work and they're judged based upon the raw number of cases they complete. There's constant pressure to produce numbers. The easiest way to produce numbers is to work on the easiest cases first and let the difficult cases pile up. It makes sense from the point of view of an individual employee or manager but it's a horribly unfair situation as I expect those employees and managers know.

    By the way, when I say we're at the "Not now, not later, not ever" stage, I'm not exaggerating. I've got a fee petition pending at a payment center for more than three years. It's gathering dust because they're busy with other things, like answering Social Security's 800 number and the agency isn't tracking fee petitions. When are they ever going to be not so busy? It would take a major political change.

Appropriations Bill Advances In Senate

 

    From Government Executive:

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday advanced spending legislation that would increase the Social Security Administration’s administrative budget by $500 million, setting up a standoff with the House. ...

That figure would fall short of the $15.4 billion requested by the Biden administration in the president’s fiscal 2025 budget proposal, but it is around $1 billion more than the $13.7 billion slated for the agency under the GOP-controlled House’s version of the legislation. ...

Headcount Inches Down

    The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has finally posted updated numbers showing the headcount of employees at each agency as of the fourth quarter of 2023. Note that these numbers do not tell the whole story. They don't account for part time employees nor for overtime. Overtime is a huge part of the story at Social Security. A Full Time Equivalent (FTE) report would cover that but we seldom see FTE reports.  Here are Social Security's numbers as of December with earlier headcount numbers for comparison:

• December, 2023 60,343
  
• September, 2023 61,410
  
• June, 2023 60,726
  
• March, 2023  59,400
• December, 2022 58,916
  
• September, 2022 57,754
  
• June, 2022 58,332
  
• March, 2022 59,257
  
• December, 2021 60,422
  
• December 2020 61,816
  
• December 2019 61,969
  
• December 2018 62,946
  
• December 2017 62,777
• December 2016 63,364
• December 2015 65,518
• December 2014 65,430
• December 2013 61,957
• December 2012 64,538
• December 2010 70,270
• December 2009 67,486
• December 2008 63,733

 

Final Regs On Law Firms Representing Claimants Cleared For Publication

     The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has cleared Social Security's proposed final rules on the recognition of law firms representing claimants. To this point, the agency has insisted that only individuals can represent claimants. In the real world, however, there are these things called law firms and they like to do things like shift responsibility for a case from one of the firm's attorneys to another, something that is now difficult both for the law firm and Social Security. There's also the problems that ensue when an attorney leaves a law firm. Who gets the fee? This is a nice step forward for everyone, including Social Security. Expect these final regulations to be published in the Federal Register before long.