Patience and humor are necessary to work with the Social Security Administration

For various reasons, I am often late for watching sitcoms.  Recently, I decided to give Raising Hope a try through Hulu®.  The cast of the show are the members of the Chance family, which includes young-ish parents, the mother’s sometimes-living-in-her-own-world grandmother, a twenty-something young adult son, and the son’s baby daughter (Hope) who is the product of the son’s one-night stand with a young woman who turned out to be a serial killer(!).  The family is well meaning.  At the end of the day, they all care for each other and even more so for Hope.  They are also highly dysfunctional, which means that they inadvertently complicate life for each other and those around them even while trying to do the right thing.  This is pretty much the way that the Social Security Administration comes across.  For the most part, those who work there try to do the right thing by claimants.  But the Administration’s processes are highly dysfunctional, which results in unnecessary complications for claimants and those of us who work on their behalf.  Take the following examples.

The SSA frequently tries to process a benefit for which the applicant did not apply.  When I work with teens or very young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, most of them do not have enough Social Security work credits to be eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).  We know from the get-go that they are only eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI).  There is one online application that covers both.  At the second question, the applicant is asked to check the box for the benefit(s) for which s/he is applying.  Knowing the young person will not be eligible for SSDI, we do not check that box.  We check only the box for SSI.  But every time, every time, the Social Security administration processes their eligibility for SSDI and then sends them a denial letter for that benefit for which they were never eligible in the first place and for which they never applied.  The applicant and her/his family read the denial as applying to SSI and get upset and the SSA wastes postage and paper.

The SSA tells the applicant that s/he cannot use the online application for SSI nor does not process information provided in that application.  As noted above, the online application has a clear option to check “SSI” as an answer to the question “for which benefit are you applying”.  Nevertheless, all of the following have happened to me and some of my clients after we have submitted a complete online application.  The SSA local field office has called my client and told her/him they cannot use the online application for SSI, only for SSDI.  The local field office has called the client and re-asked all the same questions that we have already answered through the online application.  The local field office has sent the client a paper copy of the SSI application even though every public-service announcement that the administration runs encourages applicants to use the Web portal and the online process. 

The SSA sends forms to clients who clearly cannot complete them.  I have assisted clients with significant intellectual disabilities to apply for SSI and submitted as supporting documents: Individual Education Plans and neuropsychological evaluations that indicate clearly the level at which the client can process information and respond to questions.  Even so, the SSA sends these clients 10-page forms to complete and then sends a virtually identical form to the claimant’s parent—the “third-party” version to complete on the claimant’s behalf.  The claimant cannot possibly complete the form on her/his own.  A parent can complete the claimant’s own form for the claimant, but doing so is simply wasting the parent’s time duplicating the answers s/he already submitted on the “third-party” form.

The SSA sends out “we did not receive/if we don’t receive, we will take action” letters on autopilot without allowing time for the claimant’s submissions to be received and processed.  The SSA sends follow-up forms for virtually every initial application.  Sometimes, the claimant has received the forms, completed the forms, and sent the forms back only to receive a letter from the SSA stating the forms have not been received even as either the mail is headed to the field office or the fax is in the SSA queue for processing.  On at least one occasion, the “we did not receive” letter arrived well after the forms in question has been submitted and when I called to inquire, the SSA worker confirmed that the forms had, in fact, been received but “someone” on the SSA end had neglected to turn off the automated reminders.

The SSA takes inconsistent approaches to aspects of their process that should be clearly defined.  People, who are determined eligible for SSI based on disability, must contribute to their own shelter costs.  If they do not, the maximum benefit for which they are eligible is reduced by one-third for “in-kind support”.  As a result, when the SSI applicant is living with others, often family, we create an intra-family flat fee room-and-board contract, obliging the SSI recipient to pay a monthly fee for their shelter.  Due to the length of time that it takes the SSA to process an SSI application, the SSI applicant, once successful, receives a retroactive lump sum payment covering the months they have been waiting for approval.  We date the room-and-board agreement on the first month the person will be eligible but also state that the landlord will loan the rent to the tenant/SSI recipient during the waiting period and the SSI recipient will repay the loan from her/his retroactive SSI payment.  Some SSA workers insist that we cannot use the loan approach because we cannot be sure the claimant will be approved even though they know and we know that the claimant will be approved due to the severity of the disability.  Other SSA workers have encouraged applicants to backdate their room-and-board agreement to make sure that the whole retroactive payment is paid out at the unreduced rate.

Also, with regard to the room-and-board agreement, I have had SSA workers tell the claimants that they absolutely must use the so-called “fair share” method to calculate the room and board.  That is, the claimant must total up certain specific costs related to the shelter and then divide the total by the number of persons living in the home.  Fair share calculation is complicated and would need to be recalculated every time a component expense changes or if the composition of the household changed.  Moreover, if the claimant’s “fair share” turns out to exceed the maximum SSI payable, the SSI payable will be reduced by one-third for the above-mentioned “in-kind support”.  As a result, I instruct the client to use a flat-fee room and board, which is specifically permitted in the SSA’s own operations manual, even though some workers are ignorant of that allowance.

The SSA may process concurrent applications for different benefits at different rates.  A person may apply for both SSI and SSDI because s/he has a work history, but the length or depth of that work history means that the SSDI benefit will be small, leaving the same person eligible for some SSI as well.  Or a person, whose disability started before age 22, may work and be eligible for SSDI on her/his own work record.  If, at the time of application, one of her/his parents is either already receiving SSDI or a Social Security retirement benefit or has been already deceased, the applicant may be concurrently applying for SSDI on her/his own work record and a “Childhood Disability Benefit” (“CDB” also known as a “Disabled Adult Child” or “DAC” benefit) on her/his parent’s work record.  When a person is concurrently eligible for more than one disability benefit, the monthly amount of one benefit is generally a derivate of the amount of the other.  This includes the retroactive payments of each benefit.  When the SSA processes each benefit’s application at a different speed, the calculations are done incorrectly, and the person may be overpaid or underpaid on one.

In Raising Hope, Hope’s family members, their friends, and their co-workers end up muddling their way through the storyline’s complications largely by employing good humor and patience.  These qualities, I have found, are just as necessary when navigating the redundancies and unexpected complications one encounters when applying for Social Security disability benefits.