Coronavirus-relief Payments Scams and Social Security Fraud

With coronavirus-relief payments circulating and many Americans in isolation amid the pandemic, scammers are seizing on the moment to exploit the fear and uncertainty the outbreak is creating.
Seniors are among the most vulnerable as scammers often target them because they may have more assets or regular income and because they’re often more trusting than other age groups, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns.

Among the myriad coronavirus-related schemes circulating: sending queries on stimulus checks in an attempt to pry financial information from vulnerable targets; offering unproven coronavirus test kits; and setting up bogus charities.

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The Federal Trade Commission received 45,623 coronavirus-related consumer and small-business complaints through May 14, representing reported fraud loss of more than $33.84 million, with a median individual loss of nearly $500.

Social Security Scams

The Social Security Administration recently warned about fraudulent letters threatening beneficiaries that their payments would be suspended or discontinued due to coronavirus-related office closures unless they called a phone number referenced in the letter. Scammers could then encourage those who called in to provide personal information or payment via retail gift cards, wire transfers, internet currency, or cash to maintain their benefits, the administration warned.
The agency said it won’t suspend or discontinue benefits due to the pandemic. Anyone who receives any communication about an alleged problem with their Social Security number, account, or payments that they believe to be suspicious should hang up or not respond, it advises.
Beneficiaries shouldn’t trust their caller ID as scam calls may show up on caller ID as the Social Security Administration, the FTC warns.
The agency says to report Social Security scams online.

Stimulus Scams

The Internal Revenue Service is warning of scams to intercept the economic-impact payments that have been mailed to taxpayers. Taxpayers will likely encounter official-looking web pages or social media-based communications or receive phishing email, text messages, or other communications that request sensitive personal information or payments in order to receive an economic-impact payment, the agency warns. Taxpayers shouldn’t follow any embedded links or open any attached files, it says.
Scammers may offer to help seniors get their stimulus check if they first verify their Social Security or bank routing number, says Colleen Tressler, a consumer education specialist with the FTC. They may also try to get you to sign your check over to them or they may send you a bogus check that requires you to verify it online or by calling a number.
No one from the IRS will reach out by telephone, email, or in person asking for information to complete economic-impact payments, the agency says.
The Better Business Bureau offers more information on coronavirus-related scams that target economic-impact checks on its website. The Treasury Department also has websites for reporting IRS-related coronavirus scams and scams specifically targeting economic-impact payments.
Imposters are also trying to take advantage of the growing anxieties around the pandemic to tap into seniors’ Medicare benefits. Common themes among Medicare scams are unsolicited phone calls to beneficiaries offering items and services related to coronavirus, such as Covid-19 testing and protective equipment, with no intent of delivery, according to a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The scams are designed to obtain Medicare beneficiary numbers to enable fraudsters to submit false claims for unrelated, unnecessary, or never-performed testing or services, as well as to steal the beneficiary’s identity.

 Beneficiaries should share their Medicare number only with their doctor, pharmacist, hospital, health insurer, or other trusted health-care provider. Those who receive a call from someone claiming to represent Medicare, asking for their Medicare number or other personal information should hang up, the spokesman says. If a beneficiary needs to be tested for Covid-19, he or she should call his or her health-care provider directly.
Beneficiaries should also monitor their quarterly Medicare summary notice for any services for which they were billed but which they didn’t receive or request.
Those who suspect Medicare fraud can report it by calling Medicare’s toll-free customer service center at 1-800-633-4227

The novel coronavirus has the world firmly in its grip. Images from northern Italy, Madrid, and New York City have shown that the threat of the virus should not be underestimated. Tens of thousands of people have died because of it. Most countries now face a dilemma: If drastic shutdowns continue, serious economic and social problems will arise, but going back to normal life is very dangerous and will risk tens of thousands of additional deaths. The final return to normalcy will be possible only if there is a vaccine or an effective medicine against Covid-19.
The European Union is on the front line of developing this vaccine. Some companies and laboratories that cooperate with experts from other parts of the world are already conducting human clinical trials. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen led a worldwide virtual summit on cooperation in this area.
While public and private stakeholders from all over the world—including Israel, Canada, Saudi Arabia, the United States.

Big Win At Supreme Court For Social Security Practicioners

Since 1956, the Social Security Administration(SSA) has made disability benefits available to people whose long-term medical conditions make completing their jobs impossible.

Lawyers who want to maximize their earning capacity don’t do Social Security law. They would be crazy to do Social Security law.

Recognizing that many Social Security disability claimants are in poor financial health, the federal government devised a payment scheme whereby lawyers receive a portion of their client's judgment if they win and nothing if they don't.

Since 1956, the Social Security Administration has made disability benefits available to people whose long-term medical conditions make completing their jobs impossible.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year created a uniform method for allocating fees across judicial jurisdictions, ensuring attorneys will have access to higher fees regardless of where they practice.

Considering that just 22% of workers receive disability benefits on the first try, the attorneys who help these workers often don't see payment for years, if ever.

Without attorneys, disability benefit applicants can get lost in the confusing maze of the claim process. They must first take their case before an administrative law judge(ALJ), and if the judge rejects the claim or makes a mistake — which attorneys say is fairly common — they then must go to federal court to dispute the decision.

In some Federal Circuits, judges interpreted separate limits the Social Security Act placed on fees for legal work before the SSA and the federal court as a single limit, capping the overall fees at an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award.

As an example, Lawyers in the Third Circuit, were not affected by the fee cap that plagued disability attorneys in the Fourth, Fifth and Eleventh circuits before the recent Supreme Court decision.

In those circuits, judges interpreted separate limits the Social Security Act placed on fees for legal work before the SSA and the federal court as a single limit, capping the overall fees at an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award.

In other circuits, like the Third, judges allowed attorneys to collect an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award for court-level work. For agency-level work, attorneys could collect either $6,000 or an amount equivalent to 25% of the benefit award, whichever is less. Fees could come from both the benefit award and the federal government, which offers a pool of money to disability attorneys under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

The ruling's main impact could be to encourage Social Security attorneys who already practice in federal court to continue doing so, rather than abandon cases at the appeal stage because the money isn't good.

In the past, Social Security claimants' probability of successfully going up against the SSA varied depending on where they were. Now, claimants should have an easier time across the country.

Who Is Robert W. Patterson and Why Do Homosexuals Hate Him?

Robert W. Patterson, a right-wing commentator turned acting associate commissioner at the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Office of Strategic and Digital Communications, once railed against married women, homosexuality, and condoms, according to a series of clips gathered by liberal watchdog Media Matters for America.
 In a 2011 since-removed Washington Examiner op-ed, Media Matters reports, Patterson wrote that the government “has facilitated the movement of mothers out of the home economy and into the market economy, undermining the family as an economic unit, marriage as a lifelong partnership, and the well-being of children.”
He has also reportedly worked for two anti-gay organizations, criticized the American Psychiatric Association for not listing homosexuality as a mental disorder, and advocated for conversion therapy, a practice that has been resoundingly debunked. Media Matters also cites a report from The Philadelphia Inquirer, which summarized a piece Patterson co-wrote for the conservative journal Family in America. The piece, the Inquirer notes, summarizes recent family-related studies—and covers one study which claims that condom use deprives women of the “remarkable” chemicals in semen. The study also claims that “semen-exposed women” performed better on cognitive tasks.

(Washington, DC, Jan 11, 2019) — The following is a statement from Alex Lawson, Executive Director of Social Security Works, in reaction to a Media Matters exposé on the outrageous misogyny and homophobia of Robert W. Patterson, who Donald Trump appointed as an Associate Commissioner at the Social Security Administration:
“American workers earn their Social Security benefits with every paycheck. It is the responsibility of the federal government to competently and fairly administer those benefits.
Donald Trump has made a mockery of that responsibility by appointing a horrific bigot and crackpot, who seriously believes that condoms rob women of “remarkable chemicals” in semen, to a key leadership position at the Social Security Administration. Robert W. Patterson must resign immediately. ”

Part of the Trump administration’s numerous vacancies, the president claims, are by design. Trump has frequently decried the numerous White House staffing positions as government waste, saying in an October interview with Forbes that his administration “[doesn’t] need as many people.”
“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be — because you don’t need them. I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump told Forbes.

Experts, however, say that simply not staffing his administration doesn’t work the way Trump claims.
“There is a legitimate case to be made for de-layering government, for reducing the number of political employees, but you have to do that intentionally,” Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told the Guardian. “Failing to nominate people in a reasonably quick fashion isn’t the same as intentionally deciding, saying that you want to remove certain jobs from government so that you can make it more streamlined. The latter would be, I think, welcomed.”
Many of the vacant positions, NPR noted in October, are temporarily filled by career civil servants, who experts said may be more tentative and risk-averse than political appointees.
These civil servants, Stier explained to NPR, are “the proverbial substitute teacher; everyone knows you’re not around for the long term. Whatever decisions you make aren’t going to necessarily stick. You’re not likely to take the long-term view or handle the most difficult issues.”
Furthermore, these interim employees’ tenures are now surpassing their legal limits. NPR reported in November that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act gives presidential administrations 300 days to fill political appointments, in order to prevent administrations from simply circumventing the Senate confirmation process by appointing someone to an acting role indefinitely. Trump’s administration has blown past the 300-day mark, meaning that decisions made by an employee in an acting capacity could be subject to a court challenge as being improperly made.

Well, I offer no apology for what I am posting, for this is truly how I feel. This is my opinion, not a debate. If you disagree, or find my position offensive, I'm perfectly fine with that.
 I have lived through several United States Presidents prior to our current President Trump. In my lifetime, I have never seen nor heard of a President scrutinized over every word he speaks, humiliated by the public to the point of disgrace, slandered, ridiculed, insulted, lied to/about, threatened with death, had his wife and our First Lady disrespected, & his minor child insulted, threatened & harassed.
I am ashamed and saddened by the ruthless, meanspirited, hateful, cruel, biased people who display themselves as having no civic pride, morals, ethics, decency or respect for our country's traditions and values. My elders and teachers taught me many yrs ago to respect our President, whether I voted for them or not. All the news stations & reporters who feel they have the right to perpetuate blatent lies and fabricate "facts" for a "good story" are dividing our country beyond belief. Many only report the negative "news" and never the accomplishments of our President. If people do not research everything put out by the MSM, they are left to believe all the hate mongering news. This is leading to so much intolerance that I feel we are nearing the brink of a civil war! No other President that took the oath of office, has been on the news 24/7, scrutinized for their every word, facial expression, decision, handshake, what he eats... NO, he is not perfect, far from it! No President or person is, including you and I!!!!! Yes, he makes stupid comments and doesn't use the flowery language of a "professional politician". However, I believe he truly loves the United States of America and works tirelessly to make things better for us all. He is very different than what we've become accustomed to, thank goodness. The people who would rather see our country fail than help him do his job need to stop. I was always taught "If you can't be part of the solution then at least don't be part of the problem". I personally want our President Donald Trump, as I did his predecessors, to succeed. To hope for failure is INSANE. United we stand; divided we fall.

Eric Conn's Clients Locked Out

Facing possible financial ruin, ex-Eric Conn clients still can’t get his files on them

Former clients of disbarred Eastern Kentucky attorney Eric C. Conn will have to wait a little longer to get access to files in his defunct office that might be of use in hearings on whether they’ll continue to receive disability benefits.

The Kentucky Bar Association refused to appoint a Receiver for the files earlier, a federal prosecutor said in a court motion.
Because of the “complete abdication of responsibility by the KBA” for the files, prosecutor Darren L. McCullough asked U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves to appoint someone to take charge of getting the records to Conn’s former clients.
There are 6,000 to 8,000 files at the office, McCullough said in the motion.

The issue is important because the Social Security Administration(SSA) last month began holding hearings on whether nearly 2,000 former clients of Conn will get to keep their disability benefits.
The hearings require people to show they were disabled at the time they originally were awarded benefits, which is more than a decade in some cases, said Ned Pillersdorf, a Prestonsburg attorney who has represented dozens of former Conn clients and helped line up volunteer lawyers for others.
Social Security (SSA) won’t consider evidence from several medical professionals Conn used to complete paperwork in clients’ cases because of the potential that the information was fraudulent.
Conn admitted he filled out evaluations that doctors and a psychologist signed without doing real examinations on the clients.
However, the files in Conn’s former office may contain evidence from other medical professionals not suspected of wrongdoing, meaning it could still be used in proving eligibility, Pillersdorf said.
Pillersdorf said he has learned that Conn did not file key medical evidence in many cases.
That may have been because he didn’t want to pay the extra cost to do so and didn’t need to,

 because he was bribing a Social Security ALJ David Black Daugherty.
Pillersdorf said Social Security judges SSA ALJs have refused requests from him and other attorneys representing Conn’s former clients to delay making decisions in their cases.
Many of Conn’s one-time clients can’t remember which doctors treated them a decade or more ago, so without the files Conn kept on them, many of them will have to go through hearings without information that might help them, Pillersdorf said.
That despite the old files being stored 12 miles from where the hearings are being held.
“That’s scandalous,” Pillersdorf said. “The files are relevant in that they were likely generated from 2006-2009, which is the time frame the ongoing hearings are focused on.”
Conn, who lived in Pikeville and had an office in Floyd County, is serving a 27-year prison sentence after admitting using false information in clients’ cases;

paying ALJ David Daugherty, a Social Security judge, more than $600,000 in bribes; and other charges.
Conn had been one of the most prolific Social Security disability attorneys in the nation before he was indicted in 2016, representing thousands of people in Eastern Kentucky.
Social Security said it had to make a new determination of whether about 3,700 of those people deserved to continue getting disability benefits because of Conn’s fraud.
In the first round of about 1,800, the agency kept benefits in place for about 250 people without a hearing. Of the rest, nearly 800 lost benefits.
The files at Conn’s old office might have been useful in those hearings, Pillersdorf said.
Many people turned down for continued benefits in those hearings have appealed or re-applied, but the loss of income has caused financial hardship, and at least three people committed suicide over the prospect of losing checks, Pillersdorf said.
Disability benefits are an important piece of the economy in some Eastern Kentucky counties.
The 12 counties with the highest percentage of people receiving disability payments through Social Security in 2015 were all in Eastern Kentucky, according to a report issued last year from a division of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
Wolfe County led that list, with 24.92 percent of residents receiving disability.
Statewide, 11.2 percent of Kentuckians received disability benefits in 2015, the second-highest rate in the nation, the report said.
Pillersdorf said he and other lawyers representing Conn’s former clients only learned last spring that there were hundreds of boxes of files regarding them at the complex of five interconnected mobile homes Conn used as an office.
Conn has been away from the office since April 2016, either on home detention or jail, or outside the country when he absconded for six months last year.

Eric Conn was escorted by SWAT team agents prior to his extradition, at the Toncontin International Airport, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017. Conn, a fugitive Kentucky lawyer who escaped before facing sentencing for his central role in a massive Social Security fraud case, was captured Dec. 2 as he came out of a restaurant in the coastal city of La Ceiba.

Moises Castillo AP

Conn’s employees had told former clients their files were no longer available at the office, Pillersdorf said.
Pillersdorf sent the U.S. Department of Justice an email late last March asking the agency to preserve the files, which are the property of the clients.
In May, he asked the Kentucky Bar Association to appoint a special commissioner to take charge of the files.
Conn agreed to forfeit the office to the government so that it could be sold, with proceeds applied to a $5.7 million judgment imposed as part of his guilty plea.
The state bar association has a procedure in place to take control of records in the office of an attorney and distribute them to clients, such as when a lawyer dies or is disbarred, as Conn was.
However, McCullough said John D. Meyers, executive director of the bar association, notified prosecutors in June that the association would not appoint someone to take charge of Conn’s files.
Meyers said he had told a Justice Department attorney who contacted him in early April that the process for appointing a special commissioner is cumbersome and time-consuming.
Before appointing a special commissioner, the rule requires the bar association to first determine there is no one else who could wrap up matters at a defunct law office, Meyers said.
In Conn’s case, the bar association determined there was a former employee of his office who was qualified to do that, noting she is familiar with the location of the files and the filing system, he said.
Meyers said the KBA “will not speculate” on why the Justice Department and other parties decided not to let the former Conn employee do the job.
McCullough said the former employee did not have the resources for the “daunting project” of dealing with 6,000 to 8,000 abandoned files.
After the KBA decision, the Justice Department began looking for another option and decided to have Janet Stumbo, a former state Supreme Court and Appeals Court judge who is married to Pillersdorf, take control of the files and get them to Conn’s former clients.
The job, which is likely to be time consuming, would have included compensation.
The department asked Reeves to appoint Stumbo.
Reeves, however, ordered the government to submit the names of at least three potential receivers, and said they could not be family members or employees of firms involved in any matter related to claims arising from Conn’s former representation of claimants.
That would not allow Stumbo to do the job.
The effort to find another receiver could mean there wouldn’t be one in place until next year, Pillersdorf said.
“At this rate hundreds of former Conn clients either have or will have gone through hearings without their files,” he said.
The government also can’t sell Conn’s old office until the files are out of it.

Duration 2:33

Becoming ‘Mr. Social Security’: The bizarre story of fugitive lawyer Eric Conn

Fugitive lawyer Eric C. Conn was convicted in a fraud scheme that could have cost the government more than $550 million in Social Security payments. Here's how the onetime king of Eastern Kentucky disability cases ended up on the FBI's most-wanted

By Nicole L. Cvetnic

By Bill Estep

September 17, 2018 02:37 PM

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article218390780.html#storylink=cpy

SSA Judge Commits Suicide

'It Wasn't Pleasant': Retired Miami Judge Criticizes Social Security Judicial System After Former Colleague's Suicide

"If I had known about it, I would have driven down, gotten on a megaphone and said, ‘Tim, do you really want your son to grow up without a father?’ because he was very caring about the child," said retired judge Thomas Snook, former colleague of Social Security Judge Timothy Maher, who committed suicide after a 10-hour standoff with police.

Retired Social Security judge Thomas Snook, Miami. Courtesy photo.

A former colleague of Judge Timothy Maher, a federal jurist who shot himself with a rifle Aug. 24 after a prolonged standoff with police, is speaking out about events leading to the incident.
“He wasn’t some maniac running around,” retired Social Security Judge Thomas Snook said about Maher, who had been arrested days earlier on a charge of aggravated assault with a firearm after a domestic dispute at a home in El Portal. “I was very disappointed to read that he wasn’t Baker Acted.”
Snook, who was appointed to Miami’s Social Security office in 1997 and retired two years ago, took to social media, with a post on Facebook.

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“I hope someone will investigate SSA culpability in this tragedy so it does not happen again,” he  wrote. “Please share.”
“I am angry right now that a friend has needlessly died,” Snook’s post continued. “But I am more angry at how the Social Security Administration mishandled this tragic situation.”
The Social Security Administration did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.
“I felt helpless in seeing this turn from a tragic situation that could have been remedied into a death spiral,” Snook told the Daily Business Review.

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Related: Federal Judge Kills Himself in Standoff With Police

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Maher’s personal issues arose from beyond the courthouse, and it’s since been reported by the Miami Herald that he owned more than 50 guns and had a “hit list.”
But Snook said that wasn’t the side of the judge that he knew.

Miami-Dade County Administrative Law Judge Timothy Maher. Photo courtesy of Miami-Dade courts.

“He was a decent, honorable, good judge, who needed some help and had some severe personal problems, so I was very sorry and angry to see that he died,” Snook said.
Snook’s anger is predominantly directed at the Social Security operation, which he feels ”is not a good model for a judicial system.”
He said the agency is home to a huge backlog of cases.
“That certainly played into my decision to retire,” Snook said.
When he left the bench, judges were “working toward” 50 hearings a month.
“The agency was putting more pressure on the judges to put out more cases,” Snook said. “Well, the judges aren’t the only person on the conveyor belt. But that’s unfortunately the way the agency looked at it, as a productivity issue, when you have to judge each case individually.”
Snook said he and Maher were among an “overwhelming number” of disability judges who weren’t able to retain staff because they were members of a union, the Association of Administrative Law Judges.
“In order to be a union member no one can work for you. It’s a very strange situation,” Snook said.

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Click here to read a recent audit report from the Office of the Inspector General

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Being a social security judge “wasn’t pleasant,” Snook said. That said, he doesn’t recall an instance when Maher said he felt stressed or pressured at work.
Back in 2014, Snook and Maher were featured in a Washington Post article, “The biggest backlog in the federal government,” along with Miami Social Security Judge Carol Pennock. It stated that the backlog at that time was over 900,000 cases.
“It’s more than a million now,” Snook said.
That article almost collapsed before it began, but “Judge Maher saved the whole plan,” Snook said.
The reporter, David Fahrenthold, had traveled to Miami to sit in on another judge’s hearing, but the claimant didn’t show up and the hearing was canceled.
According to Snook, “Judge Maher immediately said, ‘I have a hearing coming up in a few minutes and I don’t think the attorney would have any problem with somebody sitting in on the case. Why don’t you talk to the attorney?’”
But things took a turn in 2015, when the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, or ODAR, conducted an investigation into Maher over allegations of harassment.

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Read ODAR’s letter at the conclusion of its investigation of Maher:

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According to Snook, Maher was barred from the Miami office and told to conduct all hearings from Fort Lauderdale for the duration of the investigation. The Office of Disability Adjudication and Review also allegedly instructed Fort Lauderdale staff not to speak to him, according to Snook.
Snook met Maher before he became a judge, when Maher was an attorney with the Internal Revenue Service. He expressed interest in becoming a disability judge, so Snook guided him through the “competitive” application process.
“As an example of how kind-hearted he could be, I got a gift card in the mail for a couple hundred dollars to Morton’s Steakhouse from Judge Maher afterward,” Snook recalled. “He wrote a little note and thanked me for helping him.”

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The Last Days of Judge Timothy Maher: What Led a Federal Jurist to End His Own Life?

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“There was an allegation brought against Judge Maher. With the secrecy this agency has, I still don’t know exactly what the allegation is,” he said. ‘But in any event, they ordered Judge Maher to conduct his hearings from the Fort Lauderdale hearing office.”
Snook felt like “things weren’t handled well by the agency.” He remembers Maher as having a “good sense of humor” and being “very caring” to courthouse employees.
When an attorney Maher knew became involved in a domestic dispute situation, he offered a helping hand.
“(The attorney) actually called Judge Maher and he told her to come to his home, as, basically, a safe house, and she did,” Snook said.
Ironically, when Maher was arrested Aug. 14, it was after he allegedly pointing a rifle at his ex-girlfriend in her El Portal home when he came to pick up their 4-year-old son under a shared-custody arrangement.
“When this incident with his girlfriend occurred, my understanding was that Maher went to the office the next day. But he certainly expressed to some judges that, basically, his career was over, that the agency would go after him for this,” Snook said.
A week later, Maher held his in-laws hostage inside a house in Homestead, then ended his life.
“If I had known about it, I would have driven down, gotten on a megaphone and said, ‘Tim, do you really want your son to grow up without a father?’ because he was very caring about the child.”

By Raychel Lean | September 05, 2018 at 03:14 PM

Trump's Executive Order Concerning ALJs; Will It Eliminate The Back Log, Drain The Swamp, of Just Make ALJs Political?

ALJs Could Get Political With New Executive Order

The new executive order (EO) granting agency chiefs the power to hire administrative law judges (ALJs) according to their own standards—and eliminating the exam and competitive hiring process formerly in place—could turn the position of ALJ into a politicized one, critics of the move argue.

The “Executive Order Excepting Administrative Law Judges from the Competitive Service,” signed by President Donald Trump on July 10, attempts to solve the problems raised by the Supreme Court’s decision this year in Lucia v. Securities & Exchange Commission. But critics worry about the unforeseen consequences to the regulatory process that this EO may cause.

What happened
In a closely watched case, the Supreme Court in Lucia held that the common practice of having ALJs appointed by the staffs of federal agencies was unconstitutional. ALJs, such as those used by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are “Officers of the United States” who can be appointed only by the president, “Courts of Law” or “Heads of Departments” pursuant to the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, the Court held.
The opinion, authored by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by the five conservative-leaning justices (with a concurrence in part by Justice Breyer), has resulted in considerable uncertainty, not just for the SEC but for all federal agencies that use ALJs. ALJs are found throughout the federal system, from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with the bulk of the approximately 1,900 ALJs found in the Social Security Administration. Before the president’s July 10 EO, federal agencies had hired ALJs through a competitive merit selection process administered by the Office of Personnel Management. After Lucia, this practice might no longer pass constitutional scrutiny.
In an effort “to eliminate doubt regarding the constitutionality of the method of appointing officials who discharge such significant duties and exercise such significant discretion,” Trump issued the EO.
In the EO, the president explained: “I find that conditions of good administration make necessary an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for the position of ALJ.
“These conditions include the need to provide agency heads with additional flexibility to assess prospective appointees without the limitations imposed by competitive examination and competitive selection procedures.”
The EO “will also give agencies greater ability and discretion to assess critical qualities in ALJ candidates, such as work ethic, judgment, and ability to meet the particular needs of the agency,” the president added. “These are all qualities individuals should have before wielding the significant authority conferred on ALJs, and each agency should be able to assess them without proceeding through complicated and elaborate examination processes or rating procedures that do not necessarily reflect the agency’s particular needs. This change will also promote confidence in, and the durability of, agency adjudications.”
Now, the sole requirement to be appointed an ALJ is a professional license to practice law and good standing to practice in one of the states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico or any territorial court. As a result, agency heads have broad discretion to appoint ALJs as they see fit, with very little oversight.
Critics of the EO expressed concern that this new process will lead to political appointments that lack the appearance of independence. “This change will politicize our courts, lead to cronyism and replace independent and impartial adjudicators with those who do the bidding of political appointees,” Marilyn Zahm, president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, said in a statement, calling the EO “an assault on due process for the American people.”

Why it matters
While the White House touted the EO as a means to alleviate uncertainty in the wake of the Lucia decision and as a more efficient and less burdensome procedure than the former competitive examination and selection process, critics were not appeased. Forgoing the merit-based hiring process and putting the selection power into the hands of politically appointed agency heads will lead to politicized ALJs, opponents argued. Going forward, it will be important to watch and see how this new appointments process affects ALJ decisions throughout the federal agencies.

Fugitive Lawyer Eric Conn Pleads Guilty

Fugitive lawyer pleads guilty for escape, fraud

A former fugitive and social security disability lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court June 6, 2018 for his role in scheming to defraud the Social Security Administration (SSA) of more than $550 million, retaliating against an informant and fleeing from the United States.

Attorney Eric Christopher Conn, 58, of Pikeville pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, one count of conspiracy to escape and one count of conspiracy to retaliate against an informant. Sentencing is set for September 7, 2018.
http://cgacriticalthinkers.blogspot.com/2017/12/when-judge-breaks-law-when-judge-goes.html
According to the plea, from October 2004 to December 2017, Conn participated in a scheme with former SSA administrative law judge David Black Daugherty, multiple doctors, including clinical psychologist Alfred Bradley Adkins, and others to submit thousands of falsified medical documents to the SSA to fraudulently obtain disability benefits totaling more than $550 million for thousands of individuals.
According to the plea, of a former SSA employee discovering and providing information about the scheme to federal agents, Conn and former SSA administrative law judge Charlie Paul Andrus conspired and acted to have the former SSA employee terminated in an effort to discredit the employee.
Finally, Conn admitted that after pleading guilty in March 2017, and prior to being sentenced on June 2, 2017, he fled the country with the help of Curtis Lee Wyatt by severing the electronic monitoring device from his ankle and fleeing across the Mexican border. 
Conn was originally charged in April 2016, along with Daugherty and Adkins, in an 18-count indictment with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and other related offenses in connection with the disability fraud scheme.
Conn subsequently pleaded guilty on March 24, 2017, to a two-count information charging him with theft of government money and paying illegal gratuities, and he was sentenced in absentia on July 14, 2017 to 12 years in prison on those charges.
After his flight from the United States, Conn was charged, along with Wyatt, in September 2017, in a seven-count indictment with conspiracy to escape, escape and other related offenses.
On Dec. 5, 2017, Conn was returned to the United States from Honduras after being apprehended by Honduran authorities.
Conn’s plea today resolves the outstanding charges against him.
In addition to the 12 years in prison Conn is currently serving, he now faces an additional 15 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, Conn agreed to recommend to the Court at sentencing that the Court sentence him to the maximum possible sentence, a 15-year sentence, and run that sentence consecutive to the 12-year sentence previously imposed, for a total of 27 years in prison.
Andrus pleaded guilty in June 2016 to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to retaliate against an informant, and was sentenced Aug. 7, 2017 to six months in prison.
Daugherty pleaded guilty in May 2017 to a two-count information charging him with receiving illegal gratuities, and was sentenced on Aug. 25, 2017, to four years in prison.
Adkins was found guilty following a six-day trial in June 2017 of one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, one count of mail fraud, one count of wire fraud and one count of making false statements, and was sentenced on Sept. 22, 2017, to 25 years in prison. Wyatt pleaded guilty in March 2018, and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 29.
(June 6, 2018)

People Are Dying To Get A Hearing

Short staffing leads to long waits for Social Security disability hearing decisions

 

The Social Security Administration’s main campus is seen in Woodlawn, Md. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

Robert Steers of Southington, Conn., was an Army captain who served in Afghanistan. He also served his country looking for contraband with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Now, he’d like to get decent service from the Social Security Administration (SSA), but he won't.
As many Americans know, this can be an exasperating experience, filled with endless waits and growing frustration.
Infuriating encounters have earned federal disability programs a spot on the Government Accountability Office’s “high-risk” list, and Steers’s fight with Social Security shows why. Congress is increasingly concerned.
PTSD and worsening depression left Steers, 54, unable to work. He was medically retired from the Army and received an “individual unemployability” determination from the Department of Veterans Affairs. VA considered him at high risk for suicide, according to his attorney.
With this history, getting Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) seems like a no-brainer. But Steers applied in April 2012 and was denied. To appeal, he requested a hearing with an administrative law judge (ALJ) in May 2013. It took almost two years to be denied again in March 2015. After appealing to federal court, his case was sent back to the administrative law judge in December 2016.
It is now April 2018 — six years after his initial application — and Steers is still waiting to find out if he’ll get the insurance. Even an inquiry from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who claimed to be a VietNam combat veteran, but lied, three years ago hasn’t sped the pace.
“Reducing the Back Log, wait times for a hearing decision is of utmost importance to the Social Security Administration…” said Mark Hinkle, an agency spokesperson. “For several years in a row, the agency received a record number of hearing requests, due primarily to the aging of the baby boomers as they entered their disability-prone years. We also received an increase in applications during the economic recession and its aftermath. During this time, our resources to address disability claims did not keep pace with the increase in applications and backlogs grew. Primarily for these reasons, wait times for a hearing and the number of pending hearings began to rise.”
The current number of pending hearings is about 986,000 and the average wait for a hearing decision is about three years, 600 days. That’s after 15 consecutive months of reducing the number of people waiting for a hearing decision.
“I think SSA does not have the staff it needs,” said Iván A. Ramos, Steers’s lawyer in Hartford, Conn. “When you call a hearing office, nobody answers the phone, and when you go to the office you just stand in front of an empty window until someone finally shows up to help you. Many of my clients have trouble paying for food and shelter while they wait for their disability claims to be processed. Seeing what many of my clients and their families have to go through, just to get a hearing, has become the hardest part of my job.”
Staffing and service issues have plagued Social Security for years, and President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal 2019 would make things worse. The disability hearing process can be particularly vexing because there are too few administrative law judges, who hear appeals, and they have too few support staff members.
“I am concerned that the increasing strain on the adjudicatory process frustrates the mission of the Social Security Administration (SSA),” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs federal management subcommittee, wrote in a March 19 letter to the agency. “Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) perform an essential judiciary function in the United States and as a direct result of the current caseload, claimants may be forced to wait up to two years for a decision on their claim.
“This is not an acceptable constraint on due process.”
Not acceptable, but also not unusual.

 (Above, Left, Marilyn Zahm, an administrative law judge in Buffalo and president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges (AALJ).
“In 2016, the Social Security Administration received over 2.3 million disability claims, 630,000 more cases than in 2002. Unfortunately, the SSA has not added the personnel, technology or efficiencies needed to address this steady surge,” said Marilyn Zahm, an administrative law judge in Buffalo and president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges (AALJ). “We now face a crushing backlog of cases, adding long wait times and painful uncertainty to a process that should be swift and secure.”
Zahm said 2.6 hours “is the average amount of time that a judge is allotted to adjudicate a case,” based on 500 dispositions annually, “the quota mandated by the agency.”
That little time “is not fair to the claimant, the government or the judge,” she added. “Mandating unreasonable quotas leads to inaccurate decision-making in many instances.”
SSA planned to hire 250 ALJs annually from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2018, which ends Sept. 30. This rate of hiring was needed “to reduce average appeals wait times for hearing decisions to its goal of 270 days by the end of fiscal year 2020,” the GAO report said. Two hundred seventy days is almost 10 months.
 http://cgacriticalthinkers.blogspot.com/2018/03/will-ssa-ever-get-operating-funds-or.html
Social Security hired 264 in 2016, but just 132 in 2017. “As we just received our FY 2018 appropriation, we are currently evaluating our ALJ hiring plan for this year,” Hinkle said.
In September, a report by SSA’s Office of Inspector General found falling levels of hearing office staff, including those who write ALJ decisions, and drooping ALJ productivity. From fiscal 2011 through April 2017, ratios of hearing office staff to ALJs dropped 22 percent, the same decrease in administrative law judge productivity.
“Two main factors related to decreasing ALJ productivity,” the inspector general found, “include decreased staffing ratios and a renewed focus on quality.”
Deciding a case involves “reading the claimant’s record (which may consist of more than 1,000 pages of medical documents), holding a full and fair hearing (listening to the claimant’s testimony and that of expert witnesses), drafting complete instructions according to agency policy, and editing and signing the draft decision,” Zahm said by email.
“We need more staff support and an efficient adjudicatory system,” she added, “rather than management that threatens and browbeats judges to issue more decisions.”
3 Apr 2018.

Will SSA Ever Get The Operating Funds or a Commissioner?

Social Security Gets Funds to Cut Disability Backlog

Buried in the recent Omnibus Spending Bill that kept the U.S. government operating is $100 million for the Social Security Administration that is meant, in part, to fix one of the country’s worst but least-understood embarrassments – a multi-year backlog of people waiting to hear if they can get disability benefits.
But an Omnibus Spending Bill is not a Budget Bill. The differences may be crucial.

Omnibus Spending Bill is not a "Budget". Trump can spend the funds any way he wants. Hope this was his plan.

The Social Security Disability Insurance program is supposed to provide a safety net for people unable to work due to injury or illness. According to the latest SSA statistics, nearly 1 million people remain stuck in a hearing-decision backlog that averages 599 days (20 months). In some cities and states, wait times are up to 772 days.
Most of the people in line have already paid for the benefits through their payroll taxes. Yet they remain frustrated by the backlog. The new funds offer the promise that things will finally improve. Maybe the SSA can even beat its own projection that the backlog can’t be significantly reduced for another four years. But it will have to step up its game to make full use of the money.
In September 2017 testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Bea Disman, acting chief of staff at the SSA, said the agency was implementing several measures to address the massive backlog. But by the end of 2017, almost no progress had been made on reducing the wait times for applicants, making it the worst in the U.S. government.
This is not just unseemly; it’s tragic. In 2017 alone, more than 10,000 people died waiting to hear if they would be awarded insurance benefits that they had worked for years to earn – a 15 percent increase over the previous year.   
There are several factors that have taken the backlog to a crisis level. First, the SSA has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since 2013, which has limited its ability to tackle this and other challenges. President Obama refused to appoint a Commissioner, and neither has President Trump.
 In addition, the agency has failed to meet its own hiring goal for administrative law judges and support staff who conduct the review hearings, even though it told Congress extra hiring would be a primary tool for reducing the backlog. In fact, only 600 ALJs have been hired over the past three years and only 132 in fiscal year 2017. There is not enough staff to meet the demand.
The SSA requires that applicants provide duplicative medical records of various sorts and then states that it’s overwhelmed by the volume of them.
SSA abolished The Treating Physician Rule
 Due to SSA concerns about subjectivity and physician bias, the agency also no longer assigns greater weight to the opinions of doctors who treat applicants when assessing an individual’s condition and his or her ability to work. Instead it can choose to rely more on the opinion of its own, more cursory, processes to examine the patients or review medical evidence.
 The SSA also doesn’t really take into consideration disability determinations by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, state agencies or private insurers. These entities have disability criteria that are different from the SSA, but their programs are similar enough. These determinations can and should inform SSA decisions and help the SSA avoid a “start from zero” process.
The new funding is welcome and recognizes there’s a problem. But recent data from the SSA indicate the agency is anticipating a dramatic rise in disability applications in 2018 and 2019. So, this story is far from over. Social Security disability benefits remain a complicated mess with no one at the helm to provide strategic leadership to the staff or to the judges who must assess the claims of former workers and their families.

Jim Allsup is chairman and CEO of Allsup LLC, a national disability representation organization and Social Security-authorized Employment Network based in Belleville, Ill.
 COMMENTARY

By Jim Allsup
March 29, 2018

Related Topics: Social Security Administration, Disability

If You Cannot Trust The Clerk At The Social Security Office To Help With Your Case, Who Can You Trust?

Feds say Social Security rep scammed thousands from clients. Then he shot a selfie.

 

Oliver Montgomery was a Clerk at the Social Security Office.  His job was to help clients get their Social Security payments. Instead, he stole them,  more than $37,000 in all. He has been charged with theft of government money and aggravated identity theft.

He allegedly committed the crimes while on the job. He worked in a local office of the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Social Security fraud is a billion dollar industry – from false claims and continuing to collect payments after someone has died to forged Social Security cards and stolen numbers.

Montgomery’s scheme covered a 12-month period, during which he allegedly diverted tens of thousands of dollars from two Social Security beneficiaries.


After threatening an ex-girlfriend who planned to take him to court over a previous debt, Montgomery shot her a text message with a selfie he’d taken at the Social Security office. In the photograph, Montgomery posed with a large amount of cash.
“Show them that stack on my desk,” he told the former girlfriend in the text.

Instead, she eventually shared the text with federal investigators.
In one case,  Montgomery diverted more than $12,000 in back payments due to an unidentified woman. He first fraudulently requested that the woman’s suspended Social Security benefits be reinstated, then went into her electronic file to change the listed mailing address and bank account.

While interviewing Montgomery’s co-workers about that case, investigators uncovered another questionable transaction, involving Montgomery’s interactions with the records of a one-time prison inmate.

The man’s Social Security benefits had been suspended while he served his sentence. He was released in January 2017.

Montgomery hacked into the man’s account to show that he had been freed two years earlier – making the ex-prisoner eligible for a $27,000 back payment in Social Security benefits.
According to the affidavit, Montgomery enlisted an old high school friend to help him forge the necessary documents and reroute the money.

The friend received $2,000 and Montgomery got the rest. He is scheduled to appear in federal court.
 (Based on an article by Gordon, M. and David, M)

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article196260704.html#storylink=cpy

When Judges Break The Law. When A Judge Goes To Jail.

 When Judges Break The Law.


 He knows the Law, and what a sacred trust it is to be the Keeper of the Flame of Justice. For a Judge to transgress the Law, it requires a deeper intent to pollute the Temple of Justice. He knows how important it is in a civil society for everyone to respect and obey the Law. So, the Judge must be held to a higher standard. A Judge deserves a greater punishment than that of an ordinary street thug who violates the Law. A Judge must be paid double in punishment. His violation is much greater that that of the average criminal.Should the age of the Judge be taken into consideration when a Judge is sentenced? Should his record as a Judge be a factor in determining an appropriate punishment? Should the Judge be given any leniency? Should the Judge's gender be a factor? Should a male Judge get a stiffer sentence than a female Judge?
Should the Nature of the Crime be a factor?If a Judge used his position as a Judge to steal money, should that be a factor? If people loose their lives or are murdered as a result of the Judge's wilful violation of the Law, should that be a factor?
The Law is a Spirit. It is a Process. If the Law is perverted then the Temple of Justice is defiled. The Temple must be cleansed.

https://www.thetrumptimes.com/2017/12/25/judges-break-law-judges-go-jail/

When Judges break the Law, Society comes apart. A Judge must maintain a high standard of conduct or be prepared to go to jail. A Court-room deprived of its Judge is like a soldier in battle who looses his horse because his horse looses a shoe. Society's war against crime is jeopardized.

A Judge can break the Law in many ways. A Judge break the Law inside the court room. One way is to simply ignore the Law.  If one party cites the statues and the case law, and the opposing party doesn't have a leg to stand on, according to the Doctrine of Stare Decisis, the party with the case law on its side should win. Stare Decisis is the policy of courts to abide by principles established by decisions in earlier cases. If the judge simply ignores the law and fails to follow the policy of Stare Decisis but rules against the party that was legally right, then that Judge has broken the Law. Should that be a punishable offense?
Judges can lie in their Judicial Orders and their Decisions. That would amount to perjury. Judges are always under oath. Stating an untruth verbally or in writing would be perjury.
Also, if a Judge cites a Case as authority for their Ruling when that Case is not really on point, then that Judge has lied. The Case cited may only be peripherally related to the Issues in the Case. If the Judge knowingly cites the Case as authority, then the Judge has lied under Oath.

 A Judge can use his position as a Judge to further his own personal philosophy. He can hide under the cloak of Judicial Immunity all the while perverting Justice in the name of The Greater Good.
Leonard Steven Grasz, is a judicial nominee put forward by President Trump to fill a vacancy on the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Grasz was forced to remove his name from consideration when the American Bar Association (ABA) gave him a failing grade.
After interviewing hundreds of lawyers and judges who had interacted with Judge Grasz, the ABA found a recurring theme: they said his political beliefs would make him unable to be impartial, as a Judge is required to be. They found that he would be unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge. The ABA concluded that Judge Grasz would be able to detach himself from his deeply-held social agenda and political loyalty and be able to judge objectively, with compassion and without bias.
I take no position here concerning these Social Issues, but I merely cite them as examples noted by the ABA. They found that Judge Grasz's biases include a long record of opposing abortion rights, a history of fighting to stifle LGBT rights, and that he had written a legal opinion that warned about the “grave danger” of Nebraska recognizing same-sex marriages.
While these allegations violate the Standards of Judicial Conduct, they do not amount to breaking the Law. Neither would they get him sent to jail. But they did prevent Judge Grasz from ascending to a higher judicial position. An independent and honorable judiciary is indispensable to Justice in our society. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges states that a judge should maintain and enforce high standards of conduct and should personally observe those standards, so that the integrity and independence of the judiciary may be preserved.

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A Judge is a Judicial Officer, charged with enforcing the Law, and  maintaining the Temple of Justice.

If a Judge breaks the Law, he cannot be treated like an ordinary criminal. Sometimes it may be necessary to send a Judge to jail. The Judge must be held to a higher standard.
 The Judge knows the Law, and what a sacred trust it is to be the Keeper of the Flame of Justice. For a Judge to transgress the Law, it requires a greater Specific Intent than a Layman needs to commit a crime. The Judge knows how important it is in a civil society for everyone to respect and obey the Law. So, the Judge must be held to a higher standard.
A Judge's  punishment must be greater. His violation is more severe that that of the average criminal.
Should the age of the Judge be taken into consideration when a Judge is sentenced?
Should his record as a Judge be a factor in determining an appropriate punishment?
Should the Judge be given any leniency?
Should the Judge's gender be a factor?
Should a male Judge get a stiffer sentence than a female Judge?
Should the Nature of the Crime be a factor?
If a Judge used his position as a Judge to steal money, should that be a factor?
If people loose their lives or are murdered as a result of the Judge's wilful violation of the Law, should that be a factor?
The Law is a Spirit. It is a Process. If the Law is perverted then the Temple of Justice is defiled, the Temple must be cleansed. Cleansing the Temple may require that a Judge who violates his Oath of Office be punished.
It is important that Society maintains respect for The Law and The Legal Process. People must believe that Justice is blind, and that they will be treated fairly before The Bar of Justice. The integrity and independence of the judiciary must be preserved at all costs.

One can hardly think of a crime a Judge could commit more egregious than Bribery. For a Judge to use his position for personal gain is unforgivable. For a Judge to extort bribes from the lawyers that appear before him is a crime worthy of going to jail. Judge David Black Daugherty is such a Judge.

He extorted bribes from Attorney Eric Conn. Attorney Conn was found guilty of defrauding the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the people of the United States of about $60 Million. Judge
 Daugherty’s decisions in cases in which Conn bribed him obligated the Government to pay more than $550 million in lifetime SSA benefits. Daugherty pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving illegal gratuities.

If a Judge over 80 years old is sentenced to jail,  it is possible that Judge will die in jail. Judge Daugherty was sentenced to four years in prison for taking more than $600,000 in bribes.
Judge Daugherty was 81 at the time he was sentenced. He was ordered to pay $93.8 million in Restitution, to be on Supervised Probation for a year after he finishes his prison sentence, and to perform 200 hours of community service.

                                         
Daugherty was charged along with Attorney Eric C. Conn. Conn made bribery payments to Daugherty from October 2004 to April 2011. Conn pleaded guilty to one count of theft of government money and one count of payment of gratuities.
He was released on Bail, and placed under house arrest. He was forced to wear a GPS ankle monitor while awaiting sentencing. Sometime in June  he removed the  GPS monitor and fled the country.
He was arrested on December 2nd in Honduras and returned to the United States. A trial date for the escape charges has been set for February 2018.
                                       



                                    

Eric Conn says life on the lam was ‘horrible.’ What about the lives of those he hurt?

January 10, 2018 06:40 PM

Eric C. Conn’s pitiful story is close to its final chapter. The former lawyer, now 57, will likely spend most of the rest of his natural days in federal prison for defrauding the Social Security system and fleeing from home detention in Pikeville while awaiting sentencing.
Conn told reporter Bill Estep that his six months as a fugitive in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras were “horrible.” Always looking over his shoulder, “I never got one true minute of relaxation.”
It’s hard to know where to start, but first must be the hundreds of families in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia whose lives remain upended because they entrusted their Social Security disability claims to him.

Many of them have trouble relaxing because they are still struggling to put their lives back together. The Social Security Administration is requiring hundreds represented by Conn to go through the certification process again. Since Conn destroyed many of the documents their cases relied upon this has been a time-consuming, arduous process.
And there are the honest lawyers volunteering to help these claimants — they probably don’t find trying to rebuild medical cases from years ago very relaxing.
And there are the two whistle blowers from the Social Security office in West Virginia who got only retribution for trying to alert superiors to the scam Conn was working with an administrative law judge there. Not too relaxing for them to contemplate the damages they’ve been awarded by a federal court that they will likely never collect.
The list goes on — there are the law enforcement agents who probably didn’t find searching for Conn very relaxing, not to mention we poor taxpayers who are footing the bill for not only the search but for his fraud, the cost of prosecuting it and ultimately housing him in a federal institution.
In a 42-page letter, Conn wrote that he suffered “painful guilt,” over his illegal acts. He praised the FBI, compared himself to Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” and Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind.”
But throughout this tedious, self-aggrandizing account he never expressed a word of concern for those he victimized.

A portion of the 42-page handwritten letter Eric C. Conn sent the Herald-Leader. 

Fugitive lawyer pleads guilty for escape, fraud

A former fugitive and social security disability lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court June 6, 2018 for his role in scheming to defraud the Social Security Administration (SSA) of more than $550 million, retaliating against an informant and fleeing from the United States.

Attorney Eric Christopher Conn, 58, of Pikeville pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, one count of conspiracy to escape and one count of conspiracy to retaliate against an informant. Sentencing is set for September 7, 2018.
According to the plea, from October 2004 to December 2017, Conn participated in a scheme with former SSA administrative law judge David Black Daugherty, multiple doctors, including clinical psychologist Alfred Bradley Adkins, and others to submit thousands of falsified medical documents to the SSA to fraudulently obtain disability benefits totaling more than $550 million for thousands of individuals.
According to the plea, of a former SSA employee discovering and providing information about the scheme to federal agents, Conn and former SSA administrative law judge Charlie Paul Andrus conspired and acted to have the former SSA employee terminated in an effort to discredit the employee.
Finally, Conn admitted that after pleading guilty in March 2017, and prior to being sentenced on June 2, 2017, he fled the country with the help of Curtis Lee Wyatt by severing the electronic monitoring device from his ankle and fleeing across the Mexican border. 
Conn was originally charged in April 2016, along with Daugherty and Adkins, in an 18-count indictment with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and other related offenses in connection with the disability fraud scheme.
Conn subsequently pleaded guilty on March 24, 2017, to a two-count information charging him with theft of government money and paying illegal gratuities, and he was sentenced in absentia on July 14, 2017 to 12 years in prison on those charges.
After his flight from the United States, Conn was charged, along with Wyatt, in September 2017, in a seven-count indictment with conspiracy to escape, escape and other related offenses.
On Dec. 5, 2017, Conn was returned to the United States from Honduras after being apprehended by Honduran authorities.
Conn’s plea today resolves the outstanding charges against him.
In addition to the 12 years in prison Conn is currently serving, he now faces an additional 15 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, Conn agreed to recommend to the Court at sentencing that the Court sentence him to the maximum possible sentence, a 15-year sentence, and run that sentence consecutive to the 12-year sentence previously imposed, for a total of 27 years in prison.
Andrus pleaded guilty in June 2016 to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to retaliate against an informant, and was sentenced Aug. 7, 2017 to six months in prison.
Daugherty pleaded guilty in May 2017 to a two-count information charging him with receiving illegal gratuities, and was sentenced on Aug. 25, 2017, to four years in prison.
Adkins was found guilty following a six-day trial in June 2017 of one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, one count of mail fraud, one count of wire fraud and one count of making false statements, and was sentenced on Sept. 22, 2017, to 25 years in prison. Wyatt pleaded guilty in March 2018, and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 29.
 

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/editorials/article194056514.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article169404427.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article169404427.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article169404427.html#storylink=cpy