Good Tax Planning

    From Urban Milwaukee:

2020 was a profitable year for Fiserv, the financial services company located in Brookfield. The company earned $1.1 billion in pre-tax earnings on revenue of $14.85 billion.

Even better, it paid not a dollar in federal taxes on those earnings.

Still better, it actually got a tax rebate from the IRS, of $25 million, increasing its net income for the year.

    As you will recall, Frank Bisignano, who has been nominated to become Commissioner of Social Security, is CEO of Fiserv.

Explain To Me How There Could Possibly Be Money In This

     From a press release:

... United States Magistrate Judge Embry J. Kidd has found Joshua Joseph Gray (45, New Smyrna Beach) and George Douglas Metz (51, Belleview) guilty of unlawfully video recording and failing to comply with official signs and directives inside multiple Social Security field offices. ...

According to evidence presented at trial, on various dates between November 2022 and January 2023, Gray and Metz each entered three different Social Security field offices in Central Florida while video recording. Gray and Metz continued to video record despite being informed by official signage and Social Security representatives that video recording is prohibited in Social Security offices without prior permission. ... Gray and Metz subsequently posted their video recordings, which depicted members of the public and Social Security representatives conducting business, on their public YouTube channels, where Gray and Metz were paid for their videos and solicited donations. ...

GOP Asking Questions

      Ways and Means Republicans are asking questions about implementation of the WEP/GPO bill, including whether the agency needs more money to implement it. About time they start asking questions.

     By the way, I don’t see why this letter is only signed by Republicans other than the fact that almost all civility has broken down in the House of Representatives. 

Implementation Of WEP/GPO Elimination

     I've sorta asked the question before but never received what I thought was a definitive answer. To what extent will the elimination of WEP/GPO require manual recomputations? How much of this can be done through IT? These are important questions.

    If there will be manual recomputations, I'm going to be upset if they take priority over Social Security straightening out my clients' windfall offsets and workers compensation offsets and other such routine issues. The WEP/GPO people can take their turn in line like everybody else. If it takes six months or longer, and it will if these folks aren't granted priority, welcome to the reality of what the Social Security Administration is today.

Dwindling Number Of ALJs

     Notice that unless more Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) are hired we will be below 1,000 ALJs in a few months. At one point, there were almost 2,000 ALJs at Social Security.

From Social Security. Click on image to view full size.

And Finally The Discussions Of Practicalities Begin

      From The Hill:

 On Jan. 5, President Biden signed into law the Social Security Fairness Act, which will provide new or additional Social Security benefits for about 3 million individuals who receive government pensions from jobs not covered by Social Security. …

The Social Security Administration (SSA) will now need to quickly scramble and begin issuing large back payments to millions of individuals. 

Complicating the issue, SSA received its administrative budget via a continuing resolution with no provision for the potentially large start-up costs to implement the legislation. SSA’s administrative budget has been in sharp decline over several years, and the agency recently testified before Congress that it now has “one of the lowest staffing levels in 50 years.” 

It is unlikely SSA has the bandwidth to implement the new benefit structure seamlessly, quickly and correctly.

Watch Out

 

   Despite specific language in the 14th Amendment making anyone born in the United States a U.S. citizen, the incoming Trump Administration seems determined to try to deny citizenship to those born in the U.S. to parents who were not in the U.S. legally. One crucial way of doing this would be to refuse to issue Social Security numbers to children whose parents aren't in the U.S. legally.

    I think it would be a big job to investigate the immigration/citizenship status of the parents of every baby born in the U.S. The Social Security Administration isn't ready for such a task. The public isn't ready for the delays that would be associated with this. Still, watch out. This could be coming as early as January 21, 2025.

Why Have Republicans Not Liked Stephen Goss?

     Until George W. Bush was President, I don't think any Republicans had noticed Social Security's Chief Actuary, Stephen Goss, who has just retired. He was holding a technical, non-political job. He started work for Social Security in 1973 and had been the Chief Actuary since 2001. Actuaries can argue among themselves about issues around the edge of their profession but the numbers are the numbers. It should matter little which competent person holds the position.

    You may remember that W. wanted to privatize Social Security. W. would have preferred it if Goss had supported that effort. The problem was that W. never really had a plan to privatize Social Security. He inherited a lot including an ancestral Republican hatred of Social Security but hating it doesn't mean you have a plan to replace it with something better. Instead of a plan, all W. had was a certainty that Social Security was terrible and that there had to be some way to privatize it that would be much better and that they'd figure out a plan later. It was impossible for Goss to do what W. wanted -- score W.'s plan to privatize Social Security in a way that helped advance the plan. In fact, it was impossible for him to score it at all since there never was a plan. In any case, Goss never regarded making recommendations on significant policy proposals to be part of his job duties, much less shading the numbers to help or hurt a President's preferred policy proposals.

    Do we really want to replace a widely respected non-partisan actuary with someone who fudges the numbers to help the current Administration?