SSDI/SSI Update: He Wants No Good Deed to Go Unpaid

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He Wants No Good Deed to Go Unpaid

The Social Security bureaucrat has been lauded for spotting payment

errors. Now he's seeking a reward.

By Havemann, Times Staff Writer

July 16, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-cooley16jul16,1,3532034.story

PHILADELPHIA — Traditionally, Americans like their heroes on the

modest side, fearless and undaunted by adversity but generous and

self-effacing in victory. Abraham Lincoln is the model, or Jimmy

.

Cooley is a hero — but not that kind. He's the sort who

launches lonely crusades against the odds, risks his future to help

thousands of people he does not even know, and receives high honors

for his work. But instead of expressing modest gratitude, he goes to

court demanding a big financial reward too.

When he gets money, he complains it isn't enough. And he immediately

launches new campaigns, many new campaigns, and issues more demands

for money.

Cooley, in short, is the sort who fights for justice, is often right

and is sometimes a little hard to live with.

But the story of his long, successful fight to make life better for

hundreds of thousands of America's poorest and most vulnerable

residents — as well as his parallel efforts to help the government

save millions in tax dollars — raises an uncomfortable question:

Cooley may not warm the cockles of the heart, but could a more modest

hero have accomplished what he has?

Cooley has been a midlevel bureaucrat in the Social Security

Administration for more than 30 years. For much of that time, he has

worked in the Philadelphia office as a quality control officer.

That meant making sure the agency's complex programs — which serve

retired workers, the disabled, the poor and their dependents, some 54

million in all — worked the way they should and people got the

benefits they were entitled to. Cooley was also supposed to root out

waste and overpayment.

By all accounts, he has been zealous and effective, perhaps a tad too

much so. Over the years, he has taken the agency to task for a long

list of alleged failings, both underpayments and overpayments. He

often turned out to be right, but the unrelenting, sharp-edged nature

of his critiques has left bruises.

Today, he and some colleagues say, Cooley is regarded as a pariah by

some of his superiors. And, he says, he is having an increasingly

hard time getting them to listen.

" Social Security officials have made it very clear that they don't

want to hear any more from me about agency mistakes, " Cooley

said. " When I bring up new groups of severely underpaid — and in some

cases severely overpaid — beneficiaries, they ignore or dismiss my

information. I have definitely been frozen out. "

Social Security officials decline to comment on his standing within

the agency, calling it a personnel matter.

Cooley, 56, describes himself as 5 feet 7 and 140 pounds — " about the

same size as Napoleon. " He typically wears a black shirt and no tie,

and rides his bike a mile to the office.

The case that made him a hero in many people's eyes began in 1994,

when he uncovered what may rank among the great bureaucratic snarls

in U.S. government history.

What Cooley found was evidence indicating that several hundred

thousand individuals who were both poor and disabled had received

smaller benefits than they were entitled to for many years. And that

they probably were owed several billion dollars in back payments.

The problem arose because a computer program designed to identify

those eligible for higher benefits was failing to flag a substantial

number of cases.

He spotted the problem by pawing through paper records. Then, for

seven years, he tried to explain his findings to his superiors and

persuade them to act.

For a long time, he said, agency officials brushed him aside. The

computer experts asked how a bureaucrat with no technical training

could pinpoint weaknesses in such a sophisticated system. Others told

Cooley he did not understand the policies governing the programs.

" They were patronizing, " Cooley said, " and I was at a disadvantage

because I didn't know squat about computers. "

To answer his critics, Cooley taught himself enough about computers

that he found 130,000 wrongly categorized recipients.

Social Security officials acknowledge that some 500,000 people may

have received less than they were due. The agency has cleared about

112,000 such cases and paid back benefits — a few hundred dollars in

many cases, more than $200,000 in some — to 73,000 of them.

The individual cases are mind-numbingly complex. Social Security

Commissioner Jo Anne B. Barnhart has assigned 537 caseworkers to

untangle the remaining ones, a task that may take until 2010 or

beyond. Initially, Barnhart said, she estimated it would take four to

eight hours for an expert to complete a case. Now, she has raised her

estimate to 12 to 20 hours.

Cooley has told superiors that the agency has yet to recognize an

additional 100,000 beneficiaries who were seriously underpaid because

of the computer mistake — a figure the agency said was exaggerated.

The problem Cooley unearthed resided in the overlap between two

programs. The first provides pensions to some 8 million disabled

workers and their dependents. The second, a welfare program called

Supplemental Security Income, helps 5.9 million impoverished disabled

people who have not worked enough to qualify for the pension program.

Disability pensions average $939 a month; the maximum SSI benefit is

$603 a month.

Cooley demonstrated that there were flaws in the computer program

developed in the 1970s to identify SSI recipients who might be

entitled to the larger disability pension benefit.

For some, the difference was $20 a month — a sum not trivial to many

individuals living on the edge of subsistence.

For others, more was at stake.

Cyril Young and his wife, Treca, both in their mid-40s, are legally

blind. The couple for years received SSI benefits and worked part

time at a school for the blind in Vancouver, Wash.

About three years ago, Mike Teefy of the Social Security office in

Vancouver — armed with data developed by Cooley — told the Youngs

they had been entitled to the more generous pension program. The

government paid the Youngs about $100,000 in back benefits.

" I have no complaints, but our children and grandchildren could have

had a lot better life if we had received our fair share right along, "

Cyril Young said. " What a drastic difference it could have made in

our lives. "

In 1997, the Social Security Administration presented Cooley with an

award in recognition of his " dedication and perseverance. "

Those were qualities that showed up early in his life.

Born in Indiana and raised as an Air Force brat, he lived in Florida,

Alaska and Virginia before his family settled in Michigan, where he

earned a degree in philosophy from Oakland University.

Immerwahr, now a philosophy professor at Villanova University,

remembers Cooley as one who stood out because he seemed less

interested in getting good grades than in debating the ideas

presented in the course.

Cooley joined the Social Security Administration in 1973, cutting his

teeth as a caseworker handling claims by West Virginia coal miners

seeking black-lung benefits. Two years later, he was transferred to

the quality control job in Philadelphia and immediately took the tack

that would mark his career for the next three decades: finding flaws

in the way his colleagues and superiors were doing things.

" From Day 1, I was writing up stuff that I thought should be

corrected, " he said.

His ideas, he said, were not always well-received.

For instance, he found a problem involving disabled people who

applied for benefits retroactively. He said his money-saving proposal

was shot down by headquarters as too complicated, though Congress

later adopted a similar solution.

" It was my first experience with rejection, " he said.

Again and again, Cooley found and complained of what he said were

improper payouts of tax dollars — some too small and some too large.

When the Social Security Administration honored Cooley, he reacted in

characteristic fashion: Where others might have said thank you,

Cooley complained that the recognition did not include a cash award.

He appealed twice. In 2001, he received $25,000 for identifying the

problem and last year got $20,000 more for helping devise new

software.

Barnhart had approved $32,000 more, but the government's central

Office of Personnel Management blocked it. Cooley is going to federal

court.

" In this society, what shows you're getting a job done is being paid

for it, " he said. " That's the ultimate recognition. "

Rick Warsinskey, president of the National Council of Social Security

Management Assns., said: " The fact that he's gotten these large

awards shows he's valued.

" Those who are ahead of the curve sometimes come up with more than

the system can absorb. Sometimes it's a personality thing, but he's

one of these creative people who make the agency run better. "

Even in triumph, Cooley is still making waves — identifying new

potential problem cases faster than the Social Security

Administration can clear up the old ones.

And Cooley is busy uncovering other cases of alleged injustice. For

instance, he said, he has found 11,034 elderly and disabled widows

and widowers who have been underpaid $120 million in pension benefits.

" We've been trying for over a year just to get the agency to

recognize that one, " he said, " and 1,372 of them have died in the

meantime. "