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Fraud paranoia seems to keep constant downward pressure on our social safety net. We'd rather scrap a life-saving system than accept a minimal level of fraud. Just imagine if retail businesses operated this way and shut down at the first sign of shoplifting. Instead, they mitigate where possible and treat the result as a cost-of-doing-business.

I'm pretty sure means tested welfare is specifically intended to be difficult and unpopular. If it was conceived and implemented well then it might just become a popular policy! And then that ofc slippery slopes into the US becoming a welfare state where no one wants to work (in the minds of some elites).

It’s becoming exactly the same story in the UK under the conservative government, people with lifelong disabilities forced to be assessed regularly to prove their legs or arms haven’t grown back or they haven’t grown out of their cerebral palsy etc.

According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.

One solution to this is to have fixed size budgets for assistance programs. Eg. Each week 1% of GDP will be spent on XYZ assistance program.

The funding available will be divided equally by all eligible people.

Then fraud becomes not the taxpayers problem, but the problem of other eligible people. Those people will get more if they can reduce the fraud rate.

Obviously for this to happen, the eligible people need to be empowered to do something about it - and a good way to achieve that is to give the money to a charity for the blind to distribute to the blind, rather than directly to the government's list of blind people. Obviously you need to make sure the charity has suitable governance, but there are already regulations to ensure that.

I assisted someone in the process to receive SSDI and it was the most kafkaesque process I've ever experienced. I think every individual person at the SSA involved in the case was trying their best, but it really feels like the organization functions in a way to prevent as many people as possible from getting the benefits they qualify for.

The process took us about a year and required us to bring back the same forms and supporting documentation over and over and over again. Of course this all has to be done in person so I hope your disability doesn't make it difficult for you to get transportation and accommodations during business hours!

You're told by Alice at the SSA that you need Form A with supporting documents. You bring back the documents the next day and find out that Alice is not there and you have to speak to Bob. Bob tells you that you actually needed Form B so he refuses to process what you brought in. A few days later you get a scary letter saying that because you didn't get Form A processed in time, your application has been denied. So you have to meet with Alice again who tells you that Bob was wrong, and they restart your application.

Not only is this frustrating but it proved to be critical when it came to calculating back pay. If you don't know, when you are approved for SSDI you receive backpay starting from the date you first applied, minus a few weeks or months. Well because our application kept getting unfairly denied, we didn't receive any backpay for over a year of trying to get approved.

'The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.'

When large sums of public money are given to a company, there seems to be implication that the company is better at allocating this money than the government is. There is the idea that giving money to companies in the form of grants or contracts or even tax rebatea is 'investing in the economy'

However when pennies are given to individuals, this is immediately cause of suspicion and derision. As if individuals upskilling and bettering themselves isn't fundamental to the economy.

Is this like a weired form of self hatred?

Having been through the process myself, remember to keep your self worth guarded against the summation of what they conclude you're capable of. If you make it to a hearing a judge will gavel your disability into legality after a jury of doctors and vocational experts read your verdict. You seem like a good person and these experiences shouldn't take away from that. Thanks for putting yourself out there.

>The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.

... or possibly "due to the layers of fraud paranoia, the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule". Difficult to know, I would think?

From my experience, it seems the fraud paranoia actually trends towards increasing the relative fraud rate. The layers of bullshit serve to trip up and exclude those the programs are meant to serve but don’t bother the fraudsters at all. Layers of bureaucracy don’t hurt people who are willing to just lie - it’s like why dishonest witnesses are often more compelling. It’s much easier to tell an internally consistent story when it’s all fabricated.

Of course; I’m sure that, if it were easy enough, people would commit social security fraud.

I know this is a subjective statement, but as I go through this process it just feels way, way, way over the top.

We could probably do with a lot less. We could probably make the process kinder. The experience is so humiliating and we do it to people who are already suffering.

Edit: Imagine, hypothetically, that the process were twice as kind but bumped the fraud rate to 1.5%. I would be totally OK with that. Maybe it’s worth spending a little extra public money to treat people with dignity.

I apologize; it was a little glib. I'm sure that the way it works isn't Pareto optimal; and there is clearly a problem in the U.S. of using shaming as a tool to discourage consumption of means-tested benefits, as opposed to focusing on actual good governance.

I wish you the best of luck.

No worries! You’re not out of line for being concerned about this stuff.

It’s like a lot of policy stuff: our congress critters have a very black-and-white approach to a problem that only comes in shades of gray.

And, thank you. I have a good support system these days and I think everything will eventually be OK. There’s just an unspecified amount of stupid stuff between here and there. :-)

Once a little fraud is possible an industry is set up to exploit it until it becomes dominated by fraud.

It would be possible to change policies slightly and observe the results. The slope toward vastly less punitive benefits regimes might be slippery...

That would explain the opposite situation when it comes to tax avoidance schemes.

Yes; in fact, there's excellent evidence from the IRS that the level of misreporting on tax returns increases with the opacity and difficulty of verification of income source. There's hardly any fraud for W-2 employees, and relatively large amounts of it for passthrough businesses like partnership and S-corps.

That’s something we could calculate, so any discussion about it is a deflection.

The piece of advice I can give you is: Get an attorney! It will only cost you 30% of your SSDI benefits for the first year, capped at $6,000. It's well worth the cost.

This right here. People claim tax law is bad but disability law is almost as bad in that no reasonable person could be expected to know all the details in the laws.

Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.

Since we can ask you anything: If you're comfortable with sharing, what about your disability makes it difficult to do a tech job?

Sure. In 2017 I started getting head-splitting migraines.

From 2017 to 2019 they rapidly progressed from episodic to chronic. In 2019 I could no longer hold a job longer than a few weeks because my work was being interrupted too much. It was a sad year: I started the year in a VPE position but couldn’t hold a junior SE job by the end.

I am now in one of the phases of migraine (prodrome, headache, postdrome) virtually all of the time. My treatment plan is optimized at this point, there is no non-experimental intervention that is likely to improve the situation.

Extensive medical testing has provided no clue as to underlying physical phenomenon triggering these migraines. As far as physical medicine can tell, I’ve reached the “wait and hope” stage.

I am holding out hope in one area: I am in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (and the reason for that is something I will not share because it is deeply personal). Research is showing increasingly that emotional trauma can have some strange physical side-effects and I’m really hoping that processing trauma will eventually reduce my migraine frequency and intensity.

Thanks for sharing and sorry to hear about that. I can relate a little to the migraines. I had some blinding migraines come on quickly a few years ago, but then leave just as quickly. The pain was so intense I could barely think straight during those periods. Thankfully they disappeared. Similarly, I had some head x-rays that yielded nothing out of the ordinary.

You've said you want to work so I hope you can at some point. I feel fairly confident that if you made an "Ask HN" post about your situation, someone could help you out with a very accommodating gig. Good luck

Honestly, part of it is that it’s not even fair for me to present myself as “able to work” right now.

I’ve tested my ability to work four times since 2019 and three of the four have ended up being a burden on the employer (the third was a wash; it didn’t work out but I decided to write off the invoice). I’ve been on the other side of the table and I can’t do that in good conscience.

My thesis is that I should focus solely on feeling better until I can start doing some sort of sustained work; from there I can work my way up until I am able to do rewarding things with my skillset again.

The problem is that (coming back around to the article) our benefits programs have a welfare trap. These systems should be designed to help people who can reach some level of rehabilitation get there and protect the people who can’t.