GAO Criticizes CBSV

     From Social Security Administration: Actions Needed to Help Ensure Success of Electronic Verification Service, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

The Social Security Administration (SSA) launched the Electronic Consent Based Social Security Number Verification service in June 2020. The service seeks to reduce synthetic identity fraud, which combines fictitious and real information to fabricate an identity. The service allows authorized entities—generally financial institutions and their service providers—to verify an individual's name, Social Security number, and date of birth electronically. SSA spent about $62 million from fiscal year (FY) 2018 through FY 2023, based on SSA data. ...

SSA is required to fully recover the service's costs and collected about $25 million in user fees (40 percent of $62 million total costs) as of the end of FY 2023. SSA has not met its projections for fee collections due to lower-than-expected industry participation. SSA will need to collect about $14 million annually to meet its goal to recover all costs by the end of FY 2027, based on GAO's analysis (see figure). But it is unclear if SSA can meet its goal without increasing users or fees. Subscription data through December 2023 demonstrate that the service has not significantly increased users since enrollment opened in FY 2022, and fee collections decreased after SSA increased fees in July 2023.

 SSA officials told GAO they did not plan to take significant steps to increase use of the service. Industry participants GAO interviewed cited several factors limiting their use, such as difficult-to-interpret verification results. SSA also had not established performance measures and goals for the service's use and benefit. SSA could better ensure the service achieves its intended purpose of reducing synthetic identity fraud by developing strategies and assessing tradeoffs for expanding its use and establishing related performance measures and goals. ...

GAO is making seven recommendations to SSA, including that it implements appropriate controls over IT investments, updates cost estimation guidance, develops strategies to expand use of the service, and establishes related performance measures and goals. SSA concurred with all seven recommendations and stated that it will evaluate its policies and processes to determine how to address them. ...

    Note that the synthetic identity theft being discussed here isn't being directed at Social Security. It's directed at private financial institutions.

A Poll

 

online polls

SSA In The Middle

      From WKBN:

Some Ohio seniors say they are getting their Social Security payments garnished for COVID-19 Small Business Administration (SBA) loans they say they did not take out. 

Congressman Michael Rulli, R-6th District, is looking into the problem since he has learned of at least four cases of this happening to seniors in his district. His team said they are looking into these individual cases and have an issue with the SBA putting the burden of proof on seniors instead of the SBA, who Rulli accuses of having a “lackluster handling” of identity theft with the program.

Rulli said one message to his office involved a constituent who said that two SBA loans were fraudulently taken out in their name in 2021. That person said they provided SBA with the documents they requested, such as a police report and identification, in August 2024 and has yet to receive a response. …

     I don’t know what the process is like at SBA but there’s no way to contest this sort of thing at Social Security. 

The Social Security Administration When Trump Was President

     From the Revolving Door Project:

... Former President Trump filled top roles at the SSA with people actively hostile to Social Security beneficiaries, as well as campaign donors with no real experience relevant to the agency.

 For the role of SSA commissioner, Trump nominated Andrew Saul, a GOP mega donor and “one-time handbag king” with tens of millions in assets. Saul was not entirely lacking in public service experience, however. While serving as the vice chairman of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), he ran a short-lived congressional campaign in the run-up to the 2008 presidential cycle, but he dropped out of the race four days after the New York Times revealed he had accepted donations from companies bidding on MTA contracts—potentially a violation of state ethics rules.

Saul’s most relevant experience was as George W. Bush’s Chair of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which manages the retirement savings plan for federal workers, the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). But the TSP is much more similar to a private 401(k) plan than publicly-funded Social Security benefits, which led advocates like Nancy Altman of Social Security Works to point out at the time of his nomination that while Saul’s experience with the TSP “was undoubtedly valuable, it has little value to helping him run the Social Security system, unless he seeks to privatize the program.”

When President Biden fired Saul, an action he should have taken on day one but instead held off for months, Saul embarrassed himself by calling his firing a “palace coup.” He argued that his termination was illegal—despite the Supreme Court clearly ruling that the President has the authority to fire the Commissioner.

Trump appointed Mark Warshawsky to be Deputy Commissioner for Retirement and Disability Policy, despite his record of hostility to Social Security. At the Department of the Treasury, Warshawsky worked on President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, which later earned him a nomination to the Social Security Advisory Board. In 2016, in the midst of stints at various private companies specializing in retirement income, Warshawsky published an article peddling the lie that SSDI is rife with “waste and fraud,” and bloated by people who could be working. (In reality, even the austerity-minded Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget acknowledges that fraud is “less common in the SSDI program than many believe” and “not a major cost driver for the program.”)

Several other papers Warshawsky wrote while at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center expressed skepticism about whether or not the SSA’s extremely stringent standards for assessing disability were in fact too lenient. After his SSA role, Warshawsky joined the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime proponent of cuts to Social Security and privatization.

When SSA’s Inspector General position opened up, Trump nominated Gail Ennis to the role. Inspectors General are supposed to function as independent watchdogs, but seemingly her only qualification was being a campaign donor (including up through August 2017). In her first financial disclosure, she disclosed receiving a salary of over $2 million working for WilmerHale, representing three massive banks and one hedge fund—Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel. ...

2.5% COLA

      The Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) effective for 2025 is 2.5%.

Listen To The Voters Part II

      From Data For Progress

I Have Been Seeing More Of This Problem In The Last Year

      From a recent report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG):

… [W]e reviewed a sample of 274 cases from a population of 1.5 million recipients SSA placed in non-payment status codes from March 2020 through May 2022 after determining the recipients failed to provide requested information or take requested actions. Additionally, we identified 61,176 recipients who were placed into 7 non­payment status codes during periods SSA had prohibited their use. 

Results 

SSA did not act in accordance with its policy and procedures when it processed SSI ineligibility determinations and suspensions based on applicants’, recipients’, or representative payees’ failure to provide information. SSA’s employees did not complete all required steps for 156 (57 percent) of the 274 sampled cases placed in non-payment status, which led to 96 of the 156 recipients not receiving $203,133 in SSI payments they should have received. Projecting these results to our population, we estimate SSA did not follow its policy before it denied or suspended SSI payments for 871,330 recipients. Of these recipients, we estimate 536,203 did not receive $647 million in SSI payments they should have received. …

     It’s way too easy for field office employees to deny on the basis of failure to provide information without making any serious effort to contact the claimant.

Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Conn Case

      The Supreme Court has declined to hear one of the Conn cases. The issue in this case is the statutory provision requiring that the agency act “immediately” when it detects fraud. In the Conn cases the agency didn’t act for 15 years. Did this failure give affected claimants who were not themselves guilty of fraud (their lawyer, Eric Conn, was the one who did that) a get out of jail free card? The lower courts didn’t buy that argument and the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.