Social Security’s Perilous Plan for Its Future

[eridani]

http://www.pogo.org/blog/2014/09/20140924-social-securitys-perilous-plan-for-its-future.html

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is developing a plan of action for the next ten years. The conventional wisdom is that the next decade for SSA will feature a smaller workforce, fewer field offices, and more Internet-based customer service.

Achieving the latter will require the agency to rely more on contractors. One company that will figure prominently in SSA’s future is Experian, an information services company best known as one of the “Big Three” credit reporting agencies.

The Social Security Administration contracted with Experian in 2012 to provide identity proofing and fraud prevention for My Social Security (My SSA), an online portal through which the public has 24/7 access to their earnings and benefits statements and various customer services. SSA provides Experian with identifying information for social security number holders—last name, first name, date of birth, address, and phone number. When you go to My SSA to open an account, you are redirected to an Experian site to verify your identity. Once you successfully answer a few questions based on information Experian maintains in your credit report, you are directed back to the My SSA site to continue the registration process. According to SSA, more than 14 million people have established a personalized My SSA account.

SSA’s choice of Experian to perform this function is troubling. The company has a history of cybersecurity breaches and consumer law violations. Right now, Experian is dealing with major fallout from an incident in which a subsidiary, Court Ventures, sold the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Americans to an international identity theft ring. Experian purchased Court Ventures after the fraud scheme began, but the illegality continued for several months after the acquisition. The FBI and Secret Service are investigating the incident.

Experian senior Vice President Tom Hadley admitted at a Senate hearing last year that Experian failed to detect the scam while conducting pre-acquisition due diligence. “During the due diligence process, we didn’t have total access to all the information we needed in order to completely vet that, and by the time we learned of the malfeasance nine months had expired, and the Secret Service came to us and told us of the incident,” Hadley testified at the hearing.

[Enthusiast]

1. Just one more total fuck up on the road to privatizing everything.

Ultimately this will end up costing more and creating problems for millions of people.

[yeoman6987]

9. I have a "my SSA" account

It is really handy and allows you to do a lot of thing that used to require long phone calls and/or visits to the local SS office. Great for older seniors and disabled. I would imagine when banks allowed access to banking online that some were outraged too.

[eridani]

19. So why in fucking hell can't SSA do this itself instead of farming it out

--to a sociopathic corporation which will sell the data to lord know who?

[BootLoopMc6809E]

20. re: So why in fucking hell can't SSA do this itself instead of farming it out

I blasted the SSA on their own blog about this: http://blog.ssa.gov/new-years-resolution-get-a-my-social-security-account/#comment-31283

I mean... I have tried 30 times already. Thirty times I get the "We're sorry" response. I threw everything I knew personally at it. I can't just walk into a SSA office (and wait HOURS) to get an activation code.

I mean, I receive benefits already. Can't they just use their own internal database for that??? Seriously. Skip the checks with Experian. I already get benefits from you, this agency who can't even modernize or even hire a proper PHP programmer to write middleware to realize "Hey... this is already a beneficiary. Skip the check with Experian! Get him through!"

Shit... I know better people who can do this in their sleep with a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack... but a netcat showed me they're using Microsoft IIS... (barf...)

And every time I try to get help, they don't give me any on the phone...

To simply put this in a Linux one-liner:

for ssa {still-using-experian}; do sudo rm -rvf experian* ; done

If they can't do that... this is stupid. And start using LINUX, Social Security! Microsoft IIS is WRONG!

[djean111]

2. My power company started demanding my social security number when I tried to use some

features I had always used, like extending due dates. Could not do it over the phone any more, was shunted to a live rep who told me they needed the SS# because Experian was now managing things. I said no, (as if Experian couldn't figure that out!), she sighed and said well, no extension, but a couple of weeks later the phone thing worked again. Looks to me like Experian is positioning itself to make money from something besides credit scores, since maybe people are not/cannot use credit cards as much. So tentacles must be insinuated into other things.

There will, of course be zero oversight from Congress about things like this, unless an Elizabeth Warren type looks into it.

Power company also seems to desperately want me to use automatic withdrawals from my checking account. Nope. Not for a bill without a fixed amount. In my situation, something like that could be ruinous.

[RoccoR5955]

3. Welcome to the Oligarchy,

Where everything has a price, and what was once in The Commons, is now in the hands of the private sector.
Don't they know that privatizing services does not make them cheaper, it makes them more expensive for one reason. You have to pay the high paid executives that you do not have to if these things are run by government agencies. They simply have more overhead.

Also, this is another means to break the civil service unions, which are probably some of the last very large unions in existence here in the US.

[ctsnowman]

5. Exactly!

[RKP5637]

7. Always amazes me how many in authority just don't get how egregious the private

sector can be, which often leads me to, "Follow the Money Trail!"

[adirondacker]

8. +1000. This will not end well for many. nt

[a kennedy]

10. As in this movie..... In Time. This IS what's going to happen.

[leftstreet]

18. +1

[Scuba]

4. If Democrats held the House things like this wouldn't happen.

Oh wait, the House has nothing to do with this. Never mind.

[Triana]

6. SSA no longer mails out annual statements of your account. You have to sign up on "MySSA" or

call them during business hours.

I'd rather have the annual statement.

[ReRe]

13. Thanks...

... I wondered what happened to those. I prefer the printed/mailed yearly statements too.

[bullwinkle428]

11. Privatize it, outsource it, shrink it down to the size where it can

be drowned in a bathtub. None of this is being accidentally.

K&R.

[nolabels]

12. SSA's almost let someone screw up my 85yr old mother's benefits

They perpetrators created an online personal account with her #, changed her address from California to Florida and was on the verge of taking over everything. This happened in a time span of about ten days. The only thing that stopped it was the SS has to send the old snail mail out to inform the benefit recipient of the changes.

When she got the letter, i helped her put a stop to this problem and since she is computer illiterate mostly, she won't have to worry about online activity again either. There is an option for the SS recipients to authorize for only information to be given through person contact through the phone or a physical offices of SS. This stops all online activity.

[ReRe]

14. Mark my word...

... this trick is going to come back some day as a pretense to abolish Social Security. Falls under the old trusty rule of old: "if it isn't broken, don't fix it!"

[magical thyme]

15. Experian made it pretty impossible for me to verify my identity

during the health insurance sign up last year.

My identity was stolen courtesy of Fidelity Investments losing control of a laptop with pension information back in 2006 that an idiotic VP left in a rental car parked at HP headquarters in Palo Alto. The thieves de-encrypted the software and got *all* of our pension information.

With a 2 year fraud alert due to expire, and concern about a possible unauthorized attempt to get credit that showed up on my credit bureau report, I decided to lock down my credit before the fraud alert expires.

Now nobody can get credit, including me, unless I unlock it. But Experien also wouldn't identify me so I could get through to the healthcare website.

Fucking incompetent pain in the asses they are. They also didn't supply instructions *anywhere* on how to get my free lockdown that is supposed to be available to ID theft victims. I gave up trying to find instructions or contact them, and paid the $10.

Scum. Filthy, thieving, useless scum.

[ieoeja]

16. Makes sense. Baby Boomers are retiring, so Social Security should shrink.

No, wait. That doesn't make any sense at all! Par for the neo-course though.


This, by the way, was the best thing about all the attention received by the poor ACA rollout. ACA used the exact same Experian login that SSA used. I tried signing up for My SSA back in 2012 on several occasions. It kept failing because I couldn't remember what credit card account(s) I opened back in 1985 or whatever.

I could, of course, have paid Experian for my credit report and gotten all that information. Experian would need me to verify my identity. But that was easily enough done. Just give them my Social Security Number!

Sometime after they got the ACA working, I decided to give My SSA another shot. Sure enough. They fixed it when they fixed the ACA. So all that negative attention fixed a real problem for seniors that was being ignored.

[jwirr]

17. Isn't contracting just another word for privatizing? However this is not all bad. Before ACA MN had

contracted with Blue Cross to run the Medicaid program for them. We also contract for services to various groups such as the disabled and elderly. Edited to say that they merely administered the programs - the state maintained the job of enacting them.

In my experience these programs all worked well. I was using all of them for my family.