SSA Scandal & Expanding Social Security - Where is the 'Trust Fund'?

[WhiskeyGirl]

Disability judge Harry Taylor has long been accused of misconduct. The allegations have included repeatedly sexually harassing female colleagues and employees, frequently dozing off and audibly snoring during hearings, and making an inappropriate call to a legal expert representing clients. But even as he avoided significant reprimand, he continued to award disability benefits to thousands of claimants, often without even holding a hearing, at a taxpayer cost of around $2.5 billion. The kicker: Though the Social Security Administration knew of Taylor’s shortcomings, it allows him — to this day — to continue judging its disability cases.

That’s just one shocking finding among dozens in a report aptly titled “Systemic Waste and Abuse at the Social Security Administration,” released this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It finds that 191 of the SSA’s judges rubber-stamped cases, awarding disability benefits in more than 85 percent of the cases they decided, including to claimants who almost certainly weren’t entitled to them.
 

Charles Bridges, who served as the chief administrative-law judge in the SSA’s Harrisburg, Pa., hearing office between 2004 and 2010, was so notorious for prodigally awarding benefits that one disability law firm enacted a so-called Bridges Policy: to accept “any individual as a client if their case was assigned to [Bridges], regardless of the evidence.” Between 2005 and 2013, Bridges singlehandedly awarded an estimated $4.5 billion in benefits.

The report also heavily features David Daugherty, a disability judge who awarded benefits in all but roughly 1 percent of the cases he heard. Previous reports, including ones from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, have detailed how Daugherty worked with a greedy disability attorney who was shamelessly gaming the system.

All three judges are deserving of opprobrium. Instead, as the report notes, they kept their jobs and were even periodically rewarded for their bad behavior. That’s because the SSA has adopted a warped set of benchmarks for just what counts as good performance from a disability judge.

 

Take it from current and former judges whose expert opinions are included in the House committee’s report. One spoke of how the SSA’s obsession with reducing the backlog has “prioritized the speed of processing cases over accuracy.” The result, he continues, is that “instead of only awarding benefits to adults who are unable to work, [the system] is granting benefits to those who can work — effectively giving money away for nothing.” Another judge bemoaned how, “for SSA management, ‘making goal’ [in reducing the backlog] is more important than the adjudicatory process, the quality of a judge’s work, and any considerations in making that decision.”

read more here - http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380168/ssa-scandal-jillian-kay-melchior

I read that Democrats want to expand Social Security and raise taxes.

Where is the 'Trust Fund'?  Any chance that money will be saved for future retirees?  I don't think so.

Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.  How many hundreds of million immigrants on welfare will they need to make it solvent every decade?  100 million immigrants a decade?  I read 100 million immigrants a decade in an article in 2010 - front page stuff.  Most going to the US.

Who will pay the welfare? 

What's wrong with this picture?

just my humble opinions