NOSSCR Files RICO Suit Against La Grada

     From the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR):

NOSSCR filed suit on Friday, October 18, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against a Spanish company for misleading Social Security beneficiaries and unnecessarily clogging SSA’s phone lines. The complaint alleges that La Grada Online published articles with sensationalized headlines about Social Security benefits, including a false report of a $600 payment increase in June 2024. This misinformation caused a surge in calls to SSA, overwhelming the agency's phone lines and costing NOSSCR members considerable time and money. The complaint further alleges that La Grada Online published another misleading article in August 2024, falsely claiming a "Social Security benefit boost."

The lawsuit accuses Kapital Media Productions of violating the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Lanham Trade-Mark Act, and Illinois common law. NOSSCR seeks treble damages, attorneys' fees, and an injunction to prevent La Grada Online from publishing further false information about Social Security benefits.  ...

    I see it daily but never post the crap that La Grada puts out. It's obnoxious stuff that unquestionably misleads the public for the purpose of gaining clicks. The problem is titles such as these:

Total change in Social Security checks as of this date – How do I claim the new benefits?

Social Security makes new payment schedule official – List of checks to be paid in November

Last Social Security payment of October for retirees who born between this dates – $4,873 check to be paid this week

Goodbye to Social Security benefits – List of retirees who will no longer receive payments

     I'm not going to help these sleezes by giving links.

    I know just about nothing about RICO. Does NOSSCR have standing?

 

 

Drain The Trust Funds

     From the Washington Post:

A new report projects that the Social Security Trust Fund might run out of money within six years under a Donald Trump presidency, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposed policies would not meaningfully change the current trajectory.

Social Security faces a looming funding crisis in an aging country, with trustees most recently predicting that the retirement and disability program’s trust fund will become insolvent in 2035. Many of Trump’s campaign proposals would accelerate that timeline, potentially by years, said the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that opposes large federal deficits.

In a report released Monday, the organization concluded that many of Trump’s proposed second-term agenda items all work in the same direction when it comes to the Social Security Trust Fund. The budget group did not produce a similar report on Harris’s policies because they would have a negligible effect measured only in weeks or months rather than years, said Marc Goldwein, CRFB’s senior policy director. ...

Most directly, Trump has promised that no Social Security recipients should have to pay federal income taxes on their benefits. Under current law, 40 percent of beneficiaries pay taxes on some portion of their Social Security. The tax they pay on their benefits goes directly back to the trust fund, and getting rid of it could cost the program almost $1 trillion over 10 years, the report forecast.

Other Trump policies might have indirect effects. Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented workers could cost the trust fund hundreds of millions of dollars, the CRFB said. Many undocumented immigrants have payroll taxes taken out of their paychecks for the Social Security Trust Fund, but never become eligible to claim benefits, so they are a net positive for the program. ...

 

Report On OHO Operations

     A statistical report from Social Security on performance at its Office of Hearings Operations:

Click on image to view full size

Recent Posts For Frustrated Disability Claimants

      I and my partner continue posting on the firm's separate blog directed at a different audience -- For The Frustrated Social Security Disability Claimant. Take a look at the recent posts on that blog. 

• I'm On Social Security Disability. I've Gotten Even Sicker. Can I Get A Higher Benefit?

• Arthritis

• "I Can't Afford To File For Social Security Disability. I HAVE To Get Back To Work"

• Lumbees And Social Security Disability Benefits

• Skin Disorders

• Can I Get Social Security Disability For Anxiety?

• What Are "Back" Social Security Disability Benefits?

• It Takes An Immigrant To Point Out Just How Awful This Situation Is

• Cancer

• LTD And Social Security Disability

• Wow! Funny And Incisive View Of Social Security Disability!

• Are Social Security Disability Benefits Taxable?

• Diabetes

• Are You Ashamed To Be Disabled?

• 10 Things A Disability Lawyer Can Do For You

• Liver Disease

• What Does It Mean When My Social Security Account Tells Me That They're 70% Finished Reviewing My Disability Claim?

• Can I File for My Social Security Disability?

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. ...