Reply to As fraud scandals erupt in Minnesota on Gov. Tim Walz’s watch, accountability is in short supply

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Omg they’re grasping at straws.[/quote]

CNN is grasping at straws?

Why do you think the fraud uncovered under Walz in MN is not important?[/quote]

There's literally federal monies fraud in all 50 states - taxes, COVID funds, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, veterans' benefits, etc.

Waste and fraud is a FEATURE of all these programs because scamsters are attracted to getting government money. Ask Senator Rick Scott.[/quote]

+1. I’m SSA. We still  cleaning up fraud from a corrupt ALJ in Huntington WV.  And this fraud was uncovered before I joined the agency more than a decade ago. Setill redetermine the cases.  As a result of a Huntington (which was one corrupt ALJ and one corrupt Rep out of thousands), the agency got a huge black eye.  And in response, we’ve added *a lot* of internal controls to minimize fraud.  But some fraud prevention causes more problems than it solves. We can say, for example, 30% of cases that get a hearing by an ALJ are allowed (IDK the exact number off the top of my head) and then do a deep dive into every ALJ allowing outside the 23-37% range and do a sample audit to make sure their payments are legit and they aren’t colluding with certain Reps, MDs or medical experts for kickbacks and overpaying the claims that come before them from those parties.  I’ve done some of these audits. It’s very labor intensive.

At the same time, our staffing levels are the lowest they have been, per claim, in more than 50 years. And the workload is so unrealistic and morale is so low that we lose 100 staffers to other federal agencies (often the BA which is guaranteeing full remote for certain positions to attract employees)— for every one employee we poach. More than half of our new hires don’t last a year. You wanted to elimate the federal government?  Well, SSA now has impossible production standards and very low morale (the lowest among large agencies, according to FEVs) and cannot retain employees. So, you’ve won. Let’s hope you never actually have an issue with your retirement though. You could be out of pay status for 18 months before an employee can even start to help you.  FAFO.

And the extensive fraud prevention takes even more resources away from retirement and disability. Congress has mandated that we make fraud a top priority (and they aren’t wrong— preventing fraud should be a high priority. But doing so takes manpower that Congress is not providing). Meanwhile SSI/SSDI and RSI (retirement)  claims have been pouring in at unprecedented rates because the Boomers now qualify for retirement, but some percentage were self employed, small business owners, worked out of the country, worked tipped jobs, had wages reported incorrectly or have other complications that take time (and an understanding of complex regs) to sort out. You’re 65?  The line is two miles long.  We’ll get to you in. Year and a half. In the meantime, you aren’t getting any income (although you will eventually get any backpay to which you were entitled, minus the $5k you pay to a Representative, because SSA Regs are often too complex for laypeople to navigate.

Plus, lots of people in the 60-65 age range retire, realize they can’t afford health insurance (and can’t get Medicare until age  65) and appply SSI/SSDI because it comes with an entitlement to Medicare/Medicaid (alos, because those who have always done doing physical labor just can’t anymore, and because this age group has a large number of people right now and is just less healthy than younger people, so their medical issues are more complex).  Now add in COVID which was such a disruption to the labor market and lead to a lot of claims from people who probably can work, but couldn’t get jobs during COVID.  Those claims are still working their way through the system, and people aren’t working while they wait, because they don’t want to lose entitlement.

I’ve been working with Florida initial disability claims this year, which is not my normal caseload. But, but Florida is an SSA nightmare and it’s all hands on deck. 50%+ of DISABILITY (not retirement) claims are age 60-65 (unusually w/a high school education or less, a reasonable work history in MC jobs, and a bunch of age related issues- arthritis here, anxiety or depression, cardiac or kidney issues, NAFLD, type 2 diabetes with complications… ).

Florida is a particular problem, because DeSantis the state DDS (in a weird statutory scheme, the federal government pays the salaries of state DDS employees who process initial disability and retirement  claims)— or any other FL state agencies that work with the federal government—  to slow walk cases or just not do the work at all, and thus not cooperate with the “Biden regime”.  And this isn’t just SSA. There is a hurricane and FEMA takes 2 months to cut you a check in Alabama and 18 months in FL?  That isn’t because the federal government is incompetent (wait times are reasonable in the other 49 states) or is trying to punish FL (Tx, and huge, bright red parts of the South don’t have this issue). It’s because Florida DDS employees are being paid by the federal government to process claims but literally being instructed by DeSantis, who is actually in charge of DDS employees, to obstruct, delay, return cases without processing them and to otherwise  not to do the work. Because a huge backlog makes FL’s elderly and MC white voters (who don’t begin to understand the state/federal interplay at work) angry and plays well in an election year. And sick people with no income are waiting 15-18 months for someone to look at claims, while DeSantis undermines the processing of claims, and tells FL citizens the deep state hates them.

So now Feds with other workloads have been reassigned to do the work DeSantis won’t let DDS workers do. I’m one of those Feds who volunteered to help address the backlog. I have another, permanent job that isn’t being done while I deal with Florida.  And so the backlog on my normal job is growing while people assigned to that workload are trying to dig FL out. And I’m getting case in FL where people age 55+ have been in serious accidents and have spent 18 months in inpatient rehab, had double amputations due to diabetes more than a year ago, are on permanent dialysis until the get a transplant or die, had a stroke, hung on for a year and did die, etc, etc.— and no one has even looks at these obvious cases where someone cannot work for more than year— while people with serious medical conditions cannot access Medicaid/Medicare, lose their homes, cant buy food or pay for medicine.

And, despite all the manpower we have put into anti-fraud, I am not aware of a single audit that actually found fraud. Some ALJs are assigned to states or parts of states legitimately have higher allowances — less educated population and few job options (your education and vocational history matter in these claims); older population; a population in an area with an opioid epidemic we do not allow claims for disability die to drug use, but if you use enough drugs, you have permanent physical and mental problems even once you are clean and sober), lack of access to preventive care (diabetes isn’t treated and becomes amputations or kidney failure). But the key words are minimize fraud. If you are dealing with hundreds of thousands (millions?) of SSI/SSDI case, eliminating all fraud— every crooked Representative, medical examiner, every MD who treats disability patients (which is all MDs) is impossible. It’s like playing wack a mole.

TL;DR: fraud in government programs is a complex issue and takes money and manpower to fight. Ultimately, those extra people you hire pay for themselves many times over by preventing fraudulent payments. But that doesn’t meant the Republican House will fund these efforts. Of that De Santis will administer the state portion of federal programs in good faith.

Also— it should shock no one that there was fraud and abuse in the COVID. A ton of money was poured into keeping businesses and families afloat, and it’s not like they hired many (if any) additional people to do oversight. But as much as you might wish otherwise, a lot of the money that was poured into the system was *UNDER TRUMP* in the first ten months of the pandemic, from 3/2020 to 1/2021, before vaccines. This was largely a Trump screwup. And a significant amount of fraud (and certainly the vast majority of the money that was released with minimal oversight) was not to illegal immigrants or even MC people with small businesses or who had lost their job.  It was money TRUMP GAVE to large corporations who were supposed to keep employees on the payroll. And many of these “loans” were forgiven, despite those employees having been fired.  It’s not like you could claim people working under the table as employees maintained under the PPA.

So you blame Walz here. But I doubt anything was happening in Minnesota that wasn’t happening everywhere else. And the larger problem was that Trump released the COVID funds without their being adequate safeguards. Walz— and all the other governors— were stuck with with the enforcement scheme Trump gave them. And make no mistake— that was a feature— another gift/ bribe to corporation s and ten @% in the led up to the 2020 election.

I’m so tired of Republican politicians actively trying to break the government in ways that really harm Americans, irregardless of political party-   directing state employees of SSA not to do their jobs, killing the bipartisan immigration bill sponsored by a conservative Republican, not putting adequate oversight into the massive COVID relief package— and then blaming Democrats or Fed for the government being broken and pointing to a problem they intentionally created as a reason to vote for them.

It’s gross. And if you actually care about these issues, it’s unbelievably frustrating.

PS—before you say it,  I’m not working today. Sitting in the waiting room,mgetting ready for a minor medical procedure. [/quote]

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