Griffin in Hearing on Social Security Disability Fraud: "1 Percent' Defense is Bogus

Press Release

At this morning's Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security hearing on Social Security Disability (SSD) fraud, Congressman Tim Griffin (AR-02) questioned Social Security Administration (SSA) Inspector General Patrick P. O'Carroll Jr. regarding an SSD fraud scheme recently uncovered in New York and SSA's ability to weed out bad actors. He also challenged SSA Acting Commissioner Carolyn W. Colvin's claim that only 1 percent of disability payments are incorrect.

Earlier this month, 106 people were indicted for the New York scheme, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from taxpayers.

Evidence shows people who are supposedly disabled going deep sea fishing, jet skiing, demonstrating martial arts expertise, playing basketball, golfing, riding motorcycles and more.

Fraud has also been recently exposed in Puerto Rico and West Virginia.

According to the Social Security Administration, the total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,988,269 in December 2013.

In March 2013, NPR published a stunning report on "The startling rise of disability in America." It described one county in Alabama where nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability and one well-known doctor routinely refers people to the program simply because of their lack of education and poor job prospects.

In her testimony at today's hearing, SSA Acting Commissioner Carolyn W. Colvin said that "In FY2012, approximately 99.0 percent of all Social Security Disability Insurance payments were free of an overpayment, and approximately 99.8 percent were free of an underpayment."

HEARING TRANSCRIPT:

GRIFFIN: "I want to talk a little bit about this 99 percent accuracy, 1 percent inaccurate payment of overpayments and underpayments. You hear that general talking point or that factoid, whatever you want to call it, and you think, "Well hey, everything's cool. Sounds like it's all great.' But correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. O'Carroll, until we learned about the folks that you showed up on the screen, we thought those were legitimate, correct?"

O'CARROLL: "Correct."

GRIFFIN: "So how can you or anyone tell me what they don't know? The people that we saw on the screen were part of your accuracy. Sure, you can guess. You can estimate. But you have no idea what you don't know. That's the nature of fraud. If you knew what the fraud was, the next question would be, "Why are we allowing it to happen?' So the idea that we can sit here and say, "Well it's only 1 percent'--we have no idea what it is! It could be 5 percent. It could be 10 percent. Unless you have a crystal ball that I'm not familiar with. So, I know that makes for a good sound bite, to say, "Well, it's only 1 percent.' But it's just not true. You don't know. I don't know. And I'm sure you'd say if you had more money you'd know more. I've never heard a federal agency say they need less money. Ever. It will never happen I guess. So I just want to get that point out there. I know there's a lot of hard-working people doing a good job. And you're a great guy and I've worked with you on some stuff. But I just want to clarify that. That entire talking point just needs to be erased. I'm sure it won't be, but it just makes no sense.

"Getting to the other cases of fraud--West Virginia and New York. The Chairman asked about employees. I certainly understand innocent until proven guilty in a court of law with regard to these guys, jet skis and all this nonsense, gymnasts. But when you're talking about employees, civil servants who may or may not have been involved--and only you all know the details; there's a lot of stuff you can't probably talk about here. We all know that in order to fire someone, they do not have to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law applying beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. That's not the standard to fire people. So a lot of times when things are discovered in an agency--IRS, for example, or elsewhere--people are fired long before the case has made its way through the system fully because you get enough as an employer to say, "Hey, this person shouldn't be working for me.' Now I understand it takes a whole lot of bad action in the federal government under the civil service rules to get rid of somebody. I've worked in those agencies and sometimes you think, "Short of a murder, we just have to move them around to some other desk.' We're all laughing because we know it's true. So that's an area that I'd like to hear--and I don't know--but if there are people identified as potentially bad actors, what do we do with them, we don't have to wait for courts to take action on that.

"One more thing I want to mention. And there's always a danger with anecdotal evidence. But anecdotal evidence is important for Members of Congress because we go back home and hear stories. I can tell you, I don't know if the rules that we have that a lot of people comply with make it easy to commit fraud. I don't know exactly. But I can tell you that almost every time I go home--and I'm thinking right now about the Christmas holidays--there's a guy that I know and I've talked with some folks about him. He's a former professional, he rides a motorcycle, he is very active, he does all sorts of things and he's on full disability. And I don't think it's fraud like this; I think he went right through the system. And I think they said, "You know what? There's nothing in the world that you can do. You must just get a check. Now go ride your motorcycle.' There's a lot of that that goes on. And I know that's not in your 1 percent, 99 percent calculus.

"Mr. O'Carroll, if you could just speak to the issue of employees that might need to be fired even though they're not guilty in a court of law."

O'CARROLL: "It's important when an SSA [Social Security Administration] employee goes bad, we watch very closely on it. I must tell you, I get a report every day about every one of our employee investigations that we're having and amongst them, kind of along your lines, I have two columns: I have one column that is about what has happened to that employee now. Meaning, are they still working at SSA? If they are not at SSA, are they on leave with pay or are they on leave without pay? And what we try to do is put them on leave without pay while we are [looking into] criminal activities. Sometimes we'll leave them in place because that's the only way we are going to be able to catch any co-conspirators on it. But I must assure you, first and foremost of all our priorities is employee fraud. And I must say that it's a small percentage as we talked before, but any percentage when you're talking about fraud is unacceptable.

"For the person who is riding the motorcycle and looking very healthy, that's the reason why we have the CDI units, that's why we bring the videos in to show you that we go out when there's a suspicion like that. We get 140,000 allegations a year on our hotline and we try to run out as many as we can."

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