Below is a
post made by Obshellums in response to a post I had made about Congressional Republicans who were expressing concern after the horrendous report of mentally disabled individuals being locked in a basement while their representative payees stole their Social Security disability checks:
SSA's hearing offices or at least mgmt at the one I worked at was annoyed if an employee pressed the issue that incorrect payee, recipient might be getting checks by virtue of an outdated or improper designation. I was accused of "denigrating" co-workers many times when I tried to bring old & wrong recipient and/or address info to managements' attention. Check on this a year from now & you'll see little to no improvement. SSA's ODAR is an elite and badly supervised part of SSA that cruises along ineffectively and expensively because there is no oversight that benefits taxpayers and claimants, just a subservient mind-set to pamper judges, overpaid do-little attorneys and too much middle management. Collect overpayments? Concern themselves with payee info? No, they pretend to "care about privacy of claimants--ask no questions about payees" but really that just makes their work easier. Once they decide to pay or not pay, their work is done. Looking at all that other recipient-relationship, etc., residence info might "hurt thier numbers" by slowing them down a little and hey, the money keeps pouring in to pay out so, why stress?
Let's go through and outline what this person is saying:
- I used to work at a hearing office.
- Management at that hearing office was annoyed if an employee pressed the issue of an improper payee getting payment due to an outdated or improper designation.
- I was accused of "denigrating" co-workers many times when I tried to bring old & wrong recipient and/or address info to managements' attention.
- The conditions that I saw will not change because the hearing offices are an elite and badly supervised part of SSA that cruises along ineffectively and expensively because there is no oversight that benefits taxpayers and claimants, just a subservient mind-set to pamper judges, overpaid do-little attorneys and too much middle management.
- Hearing office management pretends to "care about privacy of claimants--ask no questions about payees" but really that just makes their work easier.
- Looking at all that other recipient-relationship, etc., residence info might "hurt their numbers" by slowing them down a little.
- The money keeps pouring in to pay out so, why stress?
This may sound like a plausible grassroots report of malfeasance if you don't work at Social Security or deal with it first hand. However, if you do, the post is nonsensical, almost gibberish. Social Security's hearing offices are
not responsible for policing representative payees. They recommend that payees be appointed. On very rare occasions they adjudicate whether a payee is needed but, in general, they are just not involved, not because they are poorly managed but because others at Social Security, mostly those who work in field offices, have that responsibility.
Other items in the post also ring a false note. Pretending to care about the privacy of claimants as a reason not to do something about representative payee problems? Social Security is obsessive about privacy for good reason. It is expected of them. However, it is hard to imagine privacy being given as a reason for failing to act on a representative payee problem. Dealing with "recipient-relationship" and "residence" issues would cause delay? What is the poster talking about? Why is the poster making comments about the hearing offices being "elite", "badly supervised", "ineffective" and "expensive." Why is the poster going out of his or her way to talk about "pampered" judges and "do-little attorneys" or to suggest that money is "pouring" in or out? I could go on but why bother. This sounds like something that Newt Gingrich would have written.
This is not the first time I have seen this sort of post. There have been a number that rang a false note. This is just the most obvious example. Prior examples have put forth the notion that Social Security is badly overstaffed and ought to be given lower appropriations.
I cannot imagine this post having been written by someone who used to work at Social Security. So, who did write it and why? There are "trolls" on the internet who like to write things that are wildly provocative in order to draw a response. Could this have been written by a "troll" who jut wants to annoy and provoke? Maybe, but I doubt it. Why be a troll when you don't understand enough to even troll effectively or to understand the outrage you provoke?
Obviously, the poster has a political agenda. He or she is pretending to have been a Social Security employee. He or she has little actual knowledge of operations at Social Security. I can think of two possibilities here:
- This person could be a tea partier who has gotten carried away.
- This person could be an employee or contractor of a right wing "astroturf" group. "Astroturfing" is faux grassroots action. Astroturfers pretend to be concerned citizens but are actually paid for by corporations or wealthy individuals, such as the Koch brothers.
I may flatter myself to think that some minion of the Koch brothers would actually care about this obscure blog but the post is just so weird and so full of abusive, politically charged language that it is hard for me to see it as anything other than astroturfing.
